Translating Politeness A Comparative Analysis of Dialogue in Yakuza 0

Sammanfattning

Video game translation is a relatively new field of study with the popularisation of video games. This thesis analyses how Japanese video games are translated and what happens to the content when translating from one language to another. To achieve this, the study builds upon previous research by Santos and Humblé regarding the preservation of honorific suffixes by focusing on the translation of Yakuza 0. Japanese is a highly contextualised language with honorifics being of high importance. More specifically, this thesis focuses on the protagonist Kazuma Kiryu’s linguistic identity and the politeness strategies he uses and how these are kept or changed in the translation. By using Richard J. Watts’ theory of politic behaviour and Yoko Hasegawa’s theory on in-group and out-group, together with Venuti’s concept of domestication and foreignisation, a comparative textual analysis of selected Japanese dialogues is conducted. The results show that even if the game’s English translation successfully captures the main plot of the story, linguistic nuances are noticeably lost in the dialogue. Kiryu’s language use, which ranges from a formality shaped by internal hierarchies when addressing his in-group, to a more aggressive tone toward his out-group, is changed in the English translation. The linguistic dynamics that make up politic behaviour in the Japanese original tends to get domesticated in the English target text. By adapting the dialogues to English-speaking norms, the specific hierarchical structures are smoothed out. Consequently, the study shows that a domesticating translation strategy changes parts of the complex group relations and cultural nuances that shape the character’s yakuza identity.