Culture and video game localization : A case study of Silent Hill f

Sammanfattning

Japan has the third largest video game market in the world based on revenue, so Japan has produced many games which has become successful in international markets. One major factor in Japanese game developers’ success overseas have been said to be their internationalization and localization practices. Historically, to make the localization process easier, Japanese cultural elements were reduced by using fantasy settings or setting the games in the United States. Recently, however, a shift towards more foreignizing translation have been observed in Japanese video games. This study examines how the localization of the video game Silent Hill f has treated the cultural words during the translation into English. 102 cases of cultural terms were collected from the game and categorized by their translation technique. It was also analysed if these cases would be considered domesticating or foreignizing, to determine whether Silent Hill f followed the same shift observed in other Japanese video games. The results show that adaptation, which was considered domesticating, was the most prevalent technique used to translate cultural words. However, borrowing, which was considered foreignizing, was used frequently during the translation process, which seem to indicate that an effort was also made to preserve cultural terms. When compared with the results of other recent studies about the translation of cultural words, the localization of Silent Hill f appears to be foreignizing in its approach, even though adaptation was also used frequently.