Rewriting acknowledges and advocates manipulation (Lefevere 1992, 9) and it also highlights the presence of different forces which affect translation. We have observed the various types of control used by game companies under which the translator needs to operate. The game industry is indeed controlled by powerful game (interactive) publishers, who also develop games under their own labels as in the case of Square Enix and Electronic Arts (EA) among others. Furthermore, as we discussed, the control exerted by Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft over console manufacturing as well as game development, along with publishing and game marketing and distribution can be seen as constituting a kind of "patronage" as discussed by Lefevere (1992). Lefevere includes publishers as an example of patronage, and therefore we argue that interactive publishers - especially the three platform holders – can be considered as part of the game industry patronage system. We can consider the concept of "rewriting" as operating at both macro and micro levels in game localization. On a macro level, interactive publishers in control of the regions, forms, and timing of releases of games can be seen to be governing the distribution of localized games with region-specific adjustments.
For example, a US game company may release a more or less unmodified version of a game in the UK market while it prepares a version for Germany with a reduced blood and gore level. In this process, the German localization team is likely to be directed to systematically tone down verbal expressions of profanity or racial hatred in translation, while accompanying graphics will also be suitably adjusted.
In the meantime, Australian and Chinese versions may also have specific dimensions of the game adjusted in respect of censorship considerations. Thus, the game will exist not only in different language versions, but in versions reflecting certain different ideological stances, even if these differences may result more directly from the force of regulations than from the interactive publisher's own philosophy. At other times some publishers may decide not to make changes to meet the German or Australian regulations on the basis of their own belief in publishing a certain game, at the risk of having the game banned in those countries.
In other cases some of the changes made in a locale can be considered as driven by a given publisher's corporate stance, such as Nintendo exercising a strict in-house censorship system according to its own company values. Some such changes may be motivated by a desire to retain a certain company "image". Lefevere (1992, 4) refers to the significance of“creating images" through rewriting and explains how translation can arguably be the most influential type of rewriting "because it is able to project the image of an author and/or a (series of) work(s) in another culture" (ibid., 9). In the context of games, an interactive publisher may indeed demand, for example, the deletion of sexual or violent content or the use of discriminating words in the original work as well as in localized versions in an attempt to portray the image of a more family-oriented company. The concern about the reception of their products in different markets and the subsequent image which may be created of the company can be illustrated by their swift action in withdrawing certain products from the market. Game companies are most wary of repercussions among the wider public as well as gamers, and this sometimes leads to a costly yet voluntary recall of games, as was the case with Microsoft with Kakuto Chojin (2002), Nintendo's Wii Mario Party 8 (2007) and MindQuiz (2007) by Ubisoft as mentioned earlier. In today's electronically connected world any negative publicity could go viral. The issue with MindQuiz was raised on a talkback radio by a Belfast woman with a disabled child who happened to discover the offending word when she was playing the DS game (Richards 2007) (see 4.2.2.2). This kind of publicity is extremely damaging to a company's reputation and image, thus to be avoided at all cost.
As we stress throughout this book, game localization was chiefly a game industry invention for globalizing highly technological cultural products, generally uninformed by any existing norms of translation. The process used today resulted from a long period of trial and error, with a number of distinctive approaches shaped by specific characteristics of the medium and also industry requirements. One such example is game localization itself providing an opportunity to incorporate improvements in the order of sequential releases, as in the case of the post-gold model, so as to capitalize on the nature of software which can be upgradable by a changing of the code. These manipulations are in part based on the reception of the previous release of the product in a preceding target market. Such a practice seems to fit the concept of “rewriting" proposed by Lefevere (1992) as a means of accommodating the updates resulting from the different major forces and dominant literary style of the time, although here it is being applied to games produced within a relatively condensed time span.
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