Gender in War Video Games: The Linguacultural Representation and Localisation of Female Roles between Reality and Fictionality.

Gender issues in video games have been extensively investigated over the past decades, as Cunningham (2012) explains. Conversely, the linguacultural dimension of gender is still understudied and, due to the challenges grammatical gender may pose in translation, especially from English into Romance languages (Pettini 2018), systematic research is of paramount importance. This chapter examines a corpus of three titles released by Electronic Arts, namely Medal of Honor Warfighter (2012), Battlefield 4 (2013), and Mass Effect 3 (2012), which were purposefully selected in order to create a realism-fictionality spectrum of war video games. This study investigates the linguacultural representation of their female characters and analyzes their localization from English into Italian and Spanish from the perspective of Game Localization (O’Hagan and Mangiron 2013, Bernal Merino 2015). Parallel excerpts from in-game dialogues are compared in order to (1) show whether and how female characters are represented through language in the original game and through translation in the two target versions, (2) to explain how gender as a variable affects game translation, and (3) to make a quantitative and qualitative comparison of how Italian and Spanish translators deal with gender issues in order to deliver a linguistically gender-customised game experience.