Translation Strategies Of Video Games Based On Multimodal Discourse Analysis

League of Legends,a MOBA(multiplayer online battle arena)video game,was designed and published by American game company Riot Games.So far,League of Legends has been estimated as the most successful project in video game commercialization.During its development in China,its Chinese agency Tencent has paid great attention to its localization,which keeps regular iterations of game texts translation till today(the latest version was updated in Feb 2019).We can see,the popularity of League of Legends in China is closely related to its successful localization.As a result,in this thesis,the website crawler technology has been employed to collect the most popular translation of the game in mainstream gaming communities,like NGA(National Geographic of Azeroth),Pocket LOL(League of Legends)etc,with criteria of both discussion frequency and the number of likes of answers under the topics like what’s your favorite translation in League of Legends?Multimodal discourse conveys meanings of audiovisual discourse through various modalities and interactions between them.As a branch of audiovisual discourse,video game discourse is born with heavy multimodal gene.In the comprehensive framework of multimodal discourse analysis,meaning construction is achieved by various modalities and interactions between them,and interactions consist of two major types: the complementary and non-complementary relation;the complementary relation consists of the strengthened and non-reinforced relation,while the non-complementary relation consists of overlap,contain and situation interaction.Under the comprehensive framework of multimodal discourse analysis(Zhang,2009),the thesis selects part of the translation of champions’(champions here refer to characters in League of Legends)names and titles as study materials.More detailed analysis in the thesis consists of two aspects:(1)Meanings are generated by modalities,such as linguistic modality,visual modality and audio modality,in video game translation,and interactions between these modalities;(2)The way multimodal discourse construct meanings in video game translation.Analysis above verifies the application of the comprehensive framework of multimodal discourse analysis in video game translation.Meanwhile,two suggestions are proposed in the thesis for video game translation based on multi-modality:(1)Supplementing or reducing information according to the dominant modality;(2)Achieving the meaning construction through relation between different modalities,or different aspects of the same modality.