A Practice Report Of World Of Warcraft: Cultural Translation Strategies In Video Games

With more and more interaction between China and the West,game culture has become a new expression of the emerging literary form,which is gaining more and more attention from scholars.On the other hand,the booming international market has promoted the growth of games in multiple languages versions,which has brought about a large number of localization needs,and calls for the high-quality game translation in China.Game translation is a special kind of communication activity across languages and cultures,and cultural misreading in game translation will not only reduce the original elements of the game culture,but ruin readers' or players' interest in entertainment and consumption.In order to fill the gap between two cultures during game translation process,an in-depth understanding of the source text is the prerequisite,meanwhile it is also necessary to review and survey the background and connotation of translation from a cross-cultural perspective,and that's the only way to make two different languages and cultures easily converted,and consequently enhance the comprehension of the target readers.Based on the translation of the video game World of Warcraft,this report focuses on the compensation of cultural differences in the game translation through translation strategies and methods.The two strategies used in the translation are domestication and foreignization and the four translation methods employed to realize the strategies are free translation,literal translation,replacement,explanation and free translation.With a variety of examples from both the source text and the target text,this report tries to explore a more effective way to not only preserve cultural images in video game,but bring the playability and entertainment of the game to the target players as well.It reveals that domestication and foreignization serve the purpose of cultural translation in the video game and translators should adopt the two strategies flexibly in correspondence to the specific cultural differences,which is also a necessary part of game localization and game translation.