A Study On The English Translation Of Domestic Games

With the rapid development of the Internet,the world is beginning to pay more and more attention to the gaming industry.Games are also playing an increasingly important role in the exchange between cultures around the world.One of the most important elements in building a bridge between the entire gaming industry is the localization and foreign translation of games.Over the years,quality games have usually been imported from abroad,and the default language or source language of most games is English,so there is a wealth of research on game localization,but in contrast,there is less research on the foreign translation of games released in China.However,in the past two years,a locally developed domestic game has gone abroad and created a considerable boom,becoming a successful case of domestic games going abroad,and providing a very good research object – Genshin Impact for this research topic.The aim of this thesis is to explore the translation strategy of domestic local games for foreign translation,and to provide some theoretical insights for domestic games going abroad in the future.Taking into account the characteristics of game text translation,this thesis mainly adopts a quantitative analysis method by building a small bilingual corpus,supplemented by a transcreation theory based on the Skopos theory.This thesis classifies the vocabulary and sentences in game texts and summarizes the characteristics,then analyses the translation strategies of game texts and integrates the data to derive the percentage of translation strategies.Finally,the thesis concludes with a comparison of the local game translation strategies studied in this article with those of previous studies on game localization.The above research pattern leads the thesis to the following conclusions: Firstly,the words can be divided into two main categories,one is the functional and indicative vocabulary of the game,and the other is the textual vocabulary within the game.Next the sentences can be divided into two main categories,one being plain text and the other being voice-over text.Then the lexical features can be characterized into original compound words and culture-loaded words from various cultures.The features of sentences cover mainly space economy.Secondly,traditional translation methods such as literal translation accounted for 39.25%,liberal translation for 16.53% and omission translation for 10.21%.In the case of transcreation,combination of transcreation and literal translation accounted for 9.85%,combination of transcreation and liberal translation for 8.77% and combination of transliteration and liberal translation for9.85%.Overall,the translation method of transcreation accounts for approximately 30%of the translation methods.Thirdly,both proportion of literal translation is almost equal,and the proportion of transcreation of foreign translation is nearly 10% less than that of localization translation,but the extra part is transferred to the liberal translation.Overall,the translation strategies of the two are not much different,and the translation strategy of Transcreation can also be applied to the foreign translation of local games.