Silvia Pettini

Literature and other arts interrelate in a continuous and reciprocal exchange. In the 21st century, video games often turn literary stories, themes and characters into interactive gameplay and go beyond transmedia storytelling.
Dante’s Inferno (Visceral Games, Electronic Arts 2010) is a third-person action title, which is loosely based on the first part of the famous medieval poem, as its action premise, its beat’em up subgenre and the evident poetic licence demonstrate. Players assume the role of Dante whose avatar becomes a hyper-masculine and bellicose crusader-knight, who descends into the nine circles of Hell to save his beloved Beatrice.
From the perspective of Game Localisation (Mangiron and O’Hagan 2013), this paper examines its full localisation from English into Italian. Parallel excerpts from in-game dialogues have been selected and compared by drawing on both Electronic Arts’ authentic localisation database, and online resources such as walkthroughs. While analysing the relationship between the source and the target game texts, this study explores the influence Dante’s original lines exert on the Italian transfer. The aim is to show that, when a game is based on the target culture literature, the latter inevitably affects and constraints translation in order to ensure a more successful local impact and deliver a “deep or enhanced localisation” (Bernal-Merino 2014: 189). As first findings suggest, by means of integral or partial quotations together with lexical, syntactic and stylistic choices, the Italian game turns out to be more literarily expressive than its English source, thus providing its audience with a digital imitative Dantesque experience.

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.

Gender issues in the media and, particularly, in video games have been extensively investigated over the past decades (see Ross 2020). Conversely, the linguistic and cultural dimension of gender is still understudied and, due to the challenges it may pose in translation, especially when the transfer is from the mainly semantic gender system of English into the grammatical gender system of Romance languages, systematic research is paramount. This paper examines a fantasy war-themed role-playing game titled Dragon Age: Inquisition (Electronic Arts 2014), which presents a gender-customizable playable character, and which was purposefully selected in order to extend the realism-fictionality spectrum of war video games developed by Pettini (2020). This study investigates the representation of female characters in the game and analyzes the translation of gender 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) explain how gender as a variable affects game translation, (2) show whether and how female characters are represented through language in the original game and through translation in the two localizations, and (3) make a quantitative and qualitative comparison between the Italian and Spanish translational approach. As findings show, this research analysis confirms clear linguacultural-specific tendencies (Pettini 2020) which, as concerns Italian, disclose a sociocultural resistance to the symmetrical use of the language of gender.

Since any language cannot but mirror its speech community’s ideology, lexicographers cannot but record how that ideology is reflected in language usage (Iamartino 2020, pp. 37-38). Particularly relevant in this sense are all those entries which belong to sensitive issues in a given society: political and social ideas, religion, ethnicity, sex, and gender (Iamartino 2020, p. 36). As regards the latter, as Pinnavaia remarks (2014, p. 219), while male gender does not seem to be an issue, female gender does. Indeed, since the beginnings of dictionary-making in early modern Europe and until quite recently, dictionaries have always been full of entries, words, definitions, examples, and comments that display the contemporary patronising and often derogatory attitude of the cultural and social male elite towards women (Iamartino 2010, p. 95). In this light, this paper investigates the representation of “social gender” (Hellinger, Bußmann 2001a, p. 11) in the definitions and usage examples of a group of occupational terms in the Oxford Dictionary of English, whose free online version is hosted on the “powered by Oxford” dictionary portal Lexico.com and licensed for use to technology giants like Google, Apple and Microsoft (Ferrett, Dollinger 2020). The rationale behind the present study lies in two recent online controversies which, blaming Oxford University Press for linguistic sexism, eventually prompted the publisher to revise thousands of entries (Flood 2016, 2020; Giovanardi 2019a; Oman-Reagan 2016; Saner 2019). Accordingly, this research aims to promote a debate about the current relationship between Internet lexicography, gender, and society, while highlighting the role online platforms may play in potential ‘wars on words’ as a new form of dictionary criticism.

From the perspective of Game Localization (Bernal-Merino 2015, O’Hagan and Mangiron 2013), this paper presents a descriptive corpus-assisted study on the language of personality in The Sims 4 (Electronic Arts 2014), as the psychological dimension of this real-life simulation game represents its distinctive feature (Franklin 2014, Electronic Arts 2014a). The elaborate nature of The Sims 4 personality trait system has received academic attention, since its mechanics seem to be based on trait theory (Sloan 2015, 209), “a major approach to the study [and assessment] of human personality” in psychology (Villanueva 2010, vii). Accordingly, this paper analyzes how psychological simulation is worded in game texts and examines the features of The Sims 4 cross-linguistic personality lexicon. The original English trait system is thus compared with the Italian translation in order to explore the linguistic challenges and issues psychological customization poses to localization professionals.

In the fertile ground between cinema and video games, Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid saga stands out for its auteur’s clear tendency to use film language and aesthetics and for his evident inspiration from pop culture and the American cinematic tradition. Moreover, the series is rich in quotations meant to pay tribute to cinema and communicate with movie-cultured players intertextually. With regard to the process of localization, auteurist references to film culture represent a constraint for translators rendering Kojima’s game into different languages for a Metal Gear Solid-educated audience. This paper presents a comparative analysis of some film quotations in their English into Italian and Spanish localizations of Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid series in order to demonstrate the importance of loyalty to the game experience as a whole within a translational-cultural approach to localization.