History Of Video Game Localization

2.2.1. Localization

Within the last decades, the translation industry has seen the amazing rise of the software localization sector that is currently a part of the compound industry termed GILT, short for Globalization, Internationalization, Localization and Translation. GILT puts translation in the context of globalization that contains wider problems like making products or services accessible to international markets, involving legal, financial, marketing and other enterprise decisions in facilitating localization (Fry, 2003). The necessity for localization flourished in order to make target market versions (also regarded as locales) of content in electronic form, remarkably computer software. Software localization is totally different

Video Game Localization

It is broadly admitted that one of the major reasons of the success of games is their internationalization and globalization, a process in which localization has performed an important role. In order to magnify their benefits, most game developers, which are generally based in Japan, the US and the UK, translate – or localize, the term used in the industry – their games into other languages (Mangiron & O’Hagan, 2006). Some games are even said to accomplish nearly 50% of their revenues from international sales (Chandler, 2006).

The history of video games goes back to the 1960s when the first video game, Spacewar, was created at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Afterward, technological developments have totally transformed the video games outlook. These early games required the least amount of translation, as the games consisted mostly of dots and lines with very few command lines. By comparison, today 's main game titles present a lot of factors to be translated, reflecting complex gameplay specifications with exciting 3D graphics, surround-sound and incorporation of human voices as well as in-game cinematics, recognized as 'cut-scenes '. Video games can be categorized into variant genres like adventure/action, sports/racing, RPG, first/third person shooter, simulation, etc. Certain games, such as RPGs, have complicated storylines, leaving wide scope for translation. These games have a tendency to include the most text, and consequently are

Most important publishers of video games receive their incomes from global markets by localizing games into six to eight languages, and more (Chandler, 2005). While software localization deals mostly with English as the source language, Japanese is one of the major source languages for games localization. However, the video game was an American invention, with Higinbotham’s first primitive but ingenious tennis game constructed on an oscilloscope and Spacewar by MIT researchers in the 1960s (Poole, 2000), Japanese video games have been broadcasted in the international market due to the fact that, the look of primary games like Space Invaders in the 1970s, Pac-Man in the early 1980s, followed by the best-selling Super Mario Brothers in the mid-1980s. Into the 1990s, world hit titles for example the Pokémon series sold 140 million units global (Nakamura & Onouchi, 2006). These worldwide successes flourish the question of the role of the translation and localization in games of Japanese