The video game industry is a multi-billion dollar industry and one of the pillars of the global entertainment industry as per based on a report released in April 2021 by Newzoo. Though China is considered to generate for more than one quarter of the global game revenues, China game publishers are setting their sights on international markets, with attempts to ship their games overseas. With clear incremental cost spent on localization, publishers can increase their revenues from international sales of the localized products. The growth of the game industry and the elevation of video games as a form of global entertainment might be attributed to language transfer in bringing the products to global and new markets, so the significant role played by game localization.
One of the challenges that many localization teams face when handling products like games, which inherently contain a lot of cultural elements, is how much to foreignize and how much to domesticate or adapt the delivered products. Each decision taken in handling character names, place names, plot rewrites or transcreation can result in a product that is so foreign and new that it is difficult for non-Chinese gamers to pick up. So similar to other non-Chinese products that it loses the qualities that make it a unique Chinese game. While analyzing gathered players’ perceptions on the translation of video games, “foreignization strategies are generally preferred as games can be best enjoyed when the look and feel of the source text is maintained.” When Culturalization takes a step beyond localization, making a more fundamental examination of a game’s assumptions and choices, and then assesses the viability of those creative choices in both the global, multicultural marketplace as well as in specific locales.
The choice to domesticate or foreignize a product, and to what degrees, is not just a theoretical or independent decision. There are multiple reasons for choices made during the localization process, each of them impacting the decision to foreignize or domesticate in big or small ways. Most of these issues are deeply rooted in the way the Chinese game market functions, in the unique characteristics of the Chinese language, and the deep cultural and historical roots of Chinese culture itself. All of these issues affect decisions that localization teams make when they choose to either foreignize or domesticate a game.
The ultimate goal of game localization is to deliver equivalent player experience in the target market, which often requires a high degree of creativity and decision making in the translation process. When localization fails to do so, players will develop a sense of disconnectedness, where they are unable to associate the cultural element with anything in their own culture. It is important for the localization industry to acknowledge that game localization must be understood as involving both cultural convergence and cultural differentiation.
