An Analysis Of Video Game Subtitling Translation Under Eco-Translatology

In recent years,the game industry has flourished driven by the advance of 5G and the widespread access to the internet.As the game industry grows,game localization has become one of the main businesses of localization translation services.The game localization covers not only game text,but also game audio,game interface,game action and various other elements.In China,there are studies on the game localization for the target market and localization studies for games imported from overseas in China.However,most of these studies focus on the practice of the localization of online competitive multiplayer games,and few covers large-scale single-player games.Eco-Translatology lends a new perspective to game localization research,and not many existing related studies are involved in the game localization field.This paper expects to expand the related studies by taking the American English subtitles and Simplified Chinese subtitles of the American single-player game Red Dead Redemption Ⅱas a case study.From the perspective of translation as adaptation and/or selection theory in EcoTranslatology,this paper discusses the adaptation and selection made by translators in the linguistic,cultural,and communicative dimensions,summarizes the translation strategies used by translators,and draws the following conclusions.First,compared with multiplayer online games that rely on social interactions between the players,large single-player games focus on the interaction between the game and the player.Red Dead Redemption Ⅱ has made efforts to retain the immersion created by the game for the player in the localization process to improve the game experience for players in target markets.Second,the translators of Dead Redemption Ⅱ adapt to the syntactic and lexical differences between English and Chinese,using a variety of translation strategies to accomplish the communicative purpose of player-game interaction in single-player games.The transformations in the linguistic,cultural,and communication dimension have a high degree of holistic adaptation and selection.Third,the translators employ translation techniques such as Addition and Deletion to fulfill the transformation of the linguistic dimension.While the subtitle localization in the main storyline and side quests of the video game adopts film and television subtitle translation strategies,such as paraphrasing,Segment,and Rearrangement.The translator selects the translation strategy of domestication to meet the communicative purpose of interaction in the game.Fourth,when evaluating the localization quality of single-player games with the degree of holistic adaptation and selection,the partial omission in the linguistic and cultural dimensions is acceptable as long as the transformation of the communicative dimension remains unaffected.