The question of quality remains an unresolved issue in terms of its direct relationship to sales. Equally ambiguous is how quality is perceived by different user groups. For example, while hardcore gamers may consider games that have been somewhat sanitized as not serving customers well by depriving them of the full original flavour, even a small trace of “foreignness in a localized version may cause irritation to other gamers right at the onset of play, as is apparent in the comments of an American gamer when he set out to play Resident Evil (1996-).

So it begins here...watching as a dateline title card – 1998 July – forcefully types itself across the television screen. “1998 July"? Why not “England, London"? Why not, “A time once upon? ..Okay. This is a Japanese game. (Bissell 2010, 17)

Translators soon discover that there are discerning gamers whose knowledge of a particular game series or game system could nearly equal that of the makers of the games, and are thus able to detect any fundamental lack of understanding of the game world on the part of the localization team. Regardless of the presence of critical end users, to translate a specialized domain in which translators have never been versed is challenging and likely to leave room for problems. We used the concept of "internal and external knowledge" (Pym 2004, 28), linking it to professional norms and expectancy norms in turn and also pointed out how the former may come in conflict with the latter. Furthermore, in the game industry translators are often challenged by the differences among "norm authorities" (Chesterman 1997), such as between the end users and the game publishers or developers. Users are normally not aware of the feat involved in localizing a large-scale RPG title with a massive amount of text to be translated, voiced, and simultaneously shipped in multiple languages. They are unlikely to know that some translations had to be completed without context and without screenshots. At the same time, linguistic testers who submit their bug reports are told that the errors they spotted are not serious enough to delay the whole shipment schedule - only to discover subsequently that fan forum discussions are pointing out the very issues they had flagged in their reports which were ignored. Nevertheless the game sells well and the same process is repeated in the next project. The question of quality in game localization is never straightforward. This is also due to the fact that what affects the sense of enjoyment from the user’s perspective is not easily definable, especially in relation to the impact of translation or localization as a whole. This indeterminate nature of quality in video games as assessed by the user's sense of "fun" has extended to that of localized games.

责任编辑：admin