On the Translational Specialisation of Digital Interactive Entertainment.

Nowadays video games are a global phenomenon, gaming is a widespread pastime in society and the digital interactive entertainment industry is one of the major and most profitable creative sectors in the world. As a result, the study of video games has recently seen a surge of interdisciplinary academic interest. This paper explores the relationships between video games and the field of Languages for Special Purposes (LSP) from the perspective of Game Localisation (Mangiron/O’Hagan 2013), an emerging and worthy area of investigation within Translation Studies. Since these relationships cannot be captured holistically, an eclectic approach will be used in order to highlight the main areas of interaction. Excerpts from in-game texts will be analysed and discussed to pinpoint (a) video games’ terminology (user interfaces, instructions, platform-specific references, etc.), (b) single titles’ terminology, (c) video games’ terminology belonging to specialised domains such as sports. Special attention will be paid to the in-game textual world and the discussion will focus on the specialised translation of those game genres that require a technical subject matter expertise (Dietz 2007). In particular, this paper will focus on the sports simulation game FIFA 2014 (Electronic Arts 2013) in its English into Italian localisation. Accordingly, the aim of this pilot study is to show that on the basis of the linguistic and translational features of video games, this emerging technology-driven and market-oriented translation sector can belong to the LSP realm because, as preliminary results suggest, some games - like sports simulators - seem to require a very domain-specific language transfer specialisation in order to deliver an equivalent gameplay experience.