Aesthetic Representation In Video Game Translation

In recent years,the emergence of Internet technology has led to an increase in the popularity of video games as a form of entertainment.As a relatively new audiovisual cultural product,video games possesses both technical and artistic qualities and serves as a carrier of interactive storytelling and a unique art form,which means that the translation of video games is different from conventional translation.Although the video game industry is thriving,the research on video game translation hasn’t yet been given due attention.Current research fails to offer adequate guidance for video game translation due to the limited research perspectives and insufficient research objects.Besides,overemphasis on functional and semantic equivalence without sufficient consideration of games’ narrative and aesthetic aspects hinders the quality of video game translation.Evidently,video game translation calls for diverse research perspectives and objects.Wildermyth is a strategic role-playing game released in 2021 by an American indie game company Worldwalker Games.This game allows players to mold their characters,develop their skills during battles,witness their growth during adventures,and ultimately create legendary tales.The brilliance of Wildermyth lies in its ability to be a well-crafted role-playing game and a compelling narrative work simultaneously.The comic strips are organized in a way that ensures that the story coherently flows,while the over one million words of text enable a diversity of story development.In translating Wildermyth,the representation of artistic beauty in the source text becomes a top priority so that the players in the target languages may have a gaming experience that is on par with the source language.While focusing on the aesthetic information in the text,translation aesthetics also probes into the aesthetic phenomena in translation activities and provides a method of aesthetic representation.The application of translation aesthetics to video game translation will highlight the aesthetic information and the narrative nature of video games.Adopting Liu Miqing’s theory of translation aesthetics as the theoretical framework,this thesis aims to analyze how the aesthetic representation is achieved in the translation of Wildermyth by probing into the formal system and the non-formal system.The formal system is the collection of aesthetic symbols at phonetic,lexical,and syntactic levels.At the phonetic level,by means of onomatopoeia and rhyming,the beauty of musicality of the sound can be conveyed,which,together with meaning,adds vividness to the translated text.The translation of words follow the principle of “appropriateness,beauty and compactness” in order to better convey the aesthetic information.At the syntactic level,syntactic deviation and repetition add aesthetic appeal to the translation.The non-formal system is a fuzzy set that cannot be based on intuition;translators must grasp the emotion,intention,image,and symbol to determine the translation’s overall style,representing the beauty of the original text.This thesis concludes that translation aesthetics focuses on aesthetic factors that are easily overlooked in video game translation,which,to some extent,can be adopted to study specific types of video game translation.Meanwhile,applying translation aesthetics in video game translation presents new challenges for the translator.As an aesthetic subject,the translator must integrate aesthetic feeling,knowledge,capability,and tenacity into the translation activities.At the same time,the translator needs to explore the aesthetic information fully,thus enabling aesthetic representation in the target language.