"It ended nothing": Translating the Languages of the First World War in Video Games

History has always been a source of inspiration for game developers, and historical video games are extremely popular. Like other forms of historical fiction, games allow players to actively engage with the past, they work as history, and, thus, they influence players’ historical knowledge and consciousness, they reflect the ideologies of their designers and audiences, and have a role in constructing players’ identities, values and beliefs. If compared to other conflicts, the First World War does not have a rich history in the medium. The centenary (2014-2018), however, sparked a renewed interest in the Great War which manifested itself in gaming too, with a new wave of story-driven titles which engage with the imagery and popular memory of ‘the war to end all wars’. If great attention has been paid to this phenomenon in Historical Game Studies, the linguistic and translational dimensions of this genre of games represent a neglected research topic. To address this gap and foster debate on historical video games from the perspective of Game Localization, this paper presents the preliminary findings of a descriptive corpus-assisted case study examining the languages of the First World War in the English original version and the Italian localization of Battlefield 1 (Electronic Arts, 2016), the first bigbudget game set in WW1. Preliminary findings show that game writers do engage with the past also linguistically, they leave various traces of the phenomena characterizing English in that period in the game original texts, they simulate features of the languages of WW1 in virtual soldiers’ dialogues, but these historical traces, including lexical creations, slang expressions and borrowings and expressing the unique experiences of WW1, are so language and culture-specific that they inevitably disappear in translation, where a tendency towards neutralization can be observed.