Translation Strategies For Video Game Localization From The Perspective Of Text Typology

The 21St century witnesses electronic games becoming a novel approach to recreation.Video games can be traced back to English speaking countries in the western world,where the game industry is still the most productive thanks to their cutting-edge technologies and professionalism.Hence in China there exist enormous demands for having localized game experience.Unlike translation,localization faces even more challenges,limits,and the necessity of efficient team work to translate massive amounts of words within a short time frame.Therefore a localization team should have a general survey of game texts,adopt suitable translation strategies for different text types,ensuring work efficiency and project quality.From the perspective of text typology,the thesis analyzes the case of the Witcher 3 and concludes the text types and translation strategies of RPG games,through which the target language's quality can be improved.Currently,most Chinese scholars in the field use functional translation theory and skopos theory to analyze local text elements in video games,which are somewhat disorganized and limited to certain text elements.This thesis divides game texts into four types according to text typology,then uses Reiss's translation criticism principles to examine the Chinese version of the Witcher 3,and finally concludes their appropriate translation strategies.In conclusion,story texts are mainly expressive type,which linguistically requires translators to render their translated sentences emotion-rich and pragmatically demands translator's awareness of the exact location and time of the texts.System texts are always informative type,which linguistically requires consistent terminology and pragmatically demands the gameplay be successfully conveyed to players.Art texts are mostly informative and audio-medial types,which linguistically requires suitable style and register and pragmatically demands proper layout and use of fonts.Para-game texts belong to operative type,which linguistically requires appealing reading experience and pragmatically demands non-disclosure of commercial secretes.