On Translation Strategies For Video Games From The Perspective Of Transcreation

League of Legends is a multiplayer online battle arena video game developed and published by Riot Games.It has been loved by many Chinese players since it was introduced and localized by Chinese Internet giant Tencent.In this thesis,questionnaires are designed and done to explore players' views on Chinese translation version of League of Legends.Based on the results of the survey,the thesis tries to offer transcreation translation strategies.As the translation team of LoL has been constantly making adjustments to the game according to the feedbacks of players,this thesis takes the translation version of February 1st,2019 as study materials.A total of 84 questionnaires are collected in this survey.The results show that about 60%respondents hold that the overall translation of LoL is of high quality and the other 40%highly recognize the translation of LoL.All the respondents gave praise to the translation of both the functional text and the content text including names,titles and quotes of champions as well as names of items.Players hold that the translation of these four categories is precise and proper in general.Meanwhile players gave examples of what they considered as good translation and what should be further improved.This study uses transcreation method to analyze these examples.This thesis takes the definition of transcreation given by The Little Book of Transcreation as standards to assess whether the translation of LoL embodies transcreation method.The two standards are:all the different elements that make up a text are accurately tailored to the target audience;the finished text should read as if it were originally written in the reader's own mother tongue.The study found that even though the translation group of League of Legends might have adopted many different translation strategies whether intentionally or not,the translation embodies transcreation elements and could be explained by transcreation strategy.This in turn shows that transcreation method could be applied in game translation.In the end,according to the survey and analysis above,the thesis summarizes translation strategies for game translation from the perspective of transcreation.Translators are suggested to use both transcription and sense-for-sense translation methods,to integrate translation with local culture,to refer to distinctive background stories of games,to re-create sensitive information and to borrow words from other languages in their translation of video games.