Onlinegametranslation:Problems And Solutions

With the rapid development of network technology and game industry, more and more people begin to play online games. According to statistics, the imported online games have predominated China’s game marketin terms of quantity and popularity. These imported games need to be translated so as to satisfy the need of Chinese players, so the quality of online game translation cannot be ignored.This report, from the perspective of communicative and semantic translation raised by Peter Newmark, explores and analyzes the two major difficulties involved in translating Neverwinter Online, anonline game the author is engaged in the translation practice: lack of context and a great number of variables used in the game text. As for lack of context, the online game has neither situational context nor linguistic context, which makes the translator hard to figure out the exact meaning of each string. In addition, numeric variables and reference variables that need to be well identified are extensively used in the game text, which becomes another challenge for the translator. These difficulties can easily lead to mistranslations, thus affecting the experience of the target player. After classification and analysis of these difficulties, the author proposes corresponding solutions. To deal with the problem of context, the translator can take two-step measure: firstly, to apply undertranslation by choosing the generic instead of specific meaning of words; then to import the translated texts into the game program to verify the accuracy of the translation. When translating strings which containonly variables, the translator can adopt zero translation of moving them intactly into the target text. When translating strings which contain both variables and constants or natural language, partial translation is needed to render the part of constants or natural language while moving the part of variables into the translation.This report makes preliminary research on online game translation in the hope to provide valuable suggestions for the translator in the field.