Analysis Of The Translation Of Video Games From The Skopos Theory Perspective

The video game is developing at an amazingly fast speed though it came into being some decades ago. It used to have a marginal position and was once deemed as cyber-drug. But now the video game with its unique characteristics of interaction and the sense of participation has deeply attracted numerous strident enthusiasts. In 2011, the America National Endowment for the Arts admitted to the artistic features of video games and declared that video game was also an art form. After being ignored for years, the video game industry finally ushers in its booming spring. With the ever-accelerating pace of globalization, many game manufacturers have produced different language versions of games to scramble for the oversea market share. China with its greatest population in the world, boasts an immeasurable market potential and has become the battlefield for manufacturers. Game translation which was ignored before, gradually enters into the public horizon, as it helps the domestic players feel and experience the fineness and pleasure of games. As it starts very late in China and lacks of integral production chain, game translation is still in its infancy and translation proficiency is completely different. Whether video game is wonderful or not will greatly depend on words or audio. If translation of games cannot interpret what the original work expresses, the domestic players' feel about video game will not be as good as expected and affect people's confidence on the domestic game industry.With the help of Skopos Theory, this paper studies the most popular online game League of Legends and its translated versions from China Mainland and Taiwan, aiming to find out the translation differences in champion names, alias, ability names and background stories. After analyzing the text purposes, and comparing both translations, some improvement suggestions are given, and the most suitable choices for different situations are concluded. The author believes the Skopos theory is very conductive to enriching the present game translation studies in China, and hopes this paper can provide something meaningful for later researchers.