Example 1
Dr. Watson: Don't worry we are not going to hurt you.
Gerald: Ye're a copper at heart and ye're all bruits.
Example 2
Dr. Watson: Did you steal anything?
Gerald: I heard talk about a headpiece bein' stolen but honestly that's all
I know.
Example 3
Dr. Watson: A headpiece?
Gerald: I really don't know why they would have chose to thieve that.
Maybe it's really valuable or somethin'.
(Source: Vallance 2009)
The chatbot technology is able to keep the conversation in context and provides the game with varied modes of interface through which the player can interact with characters. The sandbox online adventure game Bot Colony under development by North Side Inc. at the time of writing is reportedly integrated with NLP technology, allowing a natural conversation in English between the player character and robots that are the game's non-playable characters (NPCs). The choice of robots as conversation partners is deliberate to avoid breaking the suspension of disbelief in case they fail to follow the conversation (Joseph 2012). Following an early prototype of the technology for natural language understanding shown at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco in 2009,126 the game's dialogue functionality is now available as a beta version in which the player can carry on a fairly natural conversation with robots (Joseph 2012). The system incorporates the player input as text or speech via a speech recognition system (speech-to-text), then the English input is parsed by the system, involving disambiguation for polysemous words, coreference resolution in a 3D environment (e.g. the player referring to an object in the shared space), Q&A reasoning and processing to understand the question and respond appropriately. It then finally leads to natural language generation in English, which needs to match the animation of the character. The game is also intended to be used as an English learning tool (ibid.). However, similar to 221B, which is not localized into other languages, there seem to be no plans to make Bot Colony available in different languages. This raises the question of the scalability of such technologies to readily incorporate different language versions. It also raises the next question of the application of MT technology, which some gamers may apply while playing the game, as such technology is becoming increasingly freely available.
MT is one of the prominent applications of NLP and has been researched and developed since the 1950s (Hutchins and Somers 1992). A recent paradigm shift in MT has seen the data-driven, as opposed to the classical rule-based, approach become the main focus, at least in research now mainly focused on statistical MT (SMT). Google Translate is one of the earliest commercial implementations of SMT seamlessly integrated into online platforms, enabling the translation of fragments of text, web pages or email messages and translating chat sessions which take place interactively via typed text. Google's NLP technologies also include automatic speech-to-text translation by combining speech recognition and MT, capable of generating interlingual subtitles (albeit not in a condensed form) for YouTube audiovisual clips. These technologies are designed with the goal of being fit-for-purpose and it is accepted that the translation quality will vary. Some users are likely to be satisfied if the alternative is no translation and when unpredictable less-than-perfect translation is of no serious consequence. NLP applications have progressed from text-to-text through text-to-speech or speech-to-text to speech-to-speech modalities, although they are still a long way from providing perfect translations as Fully Automatic High Quality Machine Translation (FAHQMT).
With portable devices such as smart phones, voice-input may be preferred to text input under certain circumstances, and this may also apply to certain types of games. For example, Apple iPhone has incorporated a personal digital assistant (PDA) called Siri127 with which the user can interact using voice commands in a number of different languages, while DoCoMo is testing a cloud-based on-demand translator phone.128 While these attempts with PDA and interpreting phones are not entirely new and any overexpectations must be avoided, the rapid development of smart phones, cloud computing, and crowdsourcing mechanisms used to rapidly collect and integrate translation data into an MT engine may lead to new workable solutions in the not too distant future.
The game designer Ernest Adams (Edge Staff 2007) lists speech recognition as one of the technologies to impact game design, allowing players to interact via voice commands. In game cultures it is already a significant part of the game-play experience to use voice commands and also speech as a means of interaction among other players when playing MMOGs. This in turn creates an issue if there are a number of languages spoken among players, as often happens in online game environments. For this very reason, in 1996 Electronic Arts (EA) licensed Systran's MT technology for integration into its MMORPG Ultima Online: The Second Age (1998). The application allowed speakers of English, German, and Japanese to be able to use automatic translation during the gameplay. Another early multiplayer online RPG title, Phantasy Star Online (2000), attempted to address the communication issue among players with use of symbols, which they called "Symbol Chat" In this system the speaker selects an intended emotion or simple instruction, which in turn appears in a speech bubble. The game also used a limited phrase book called "Word Select" which allowed the player to select a phrase to be automatically translated into a given language.129 A similar approach based on a phrase-book was used in the Auto-Translate function130 incorporated into another MMORPG title Final Fantasy XI (2002), enabling synchronous chat between Japanese- and English-speaking players. It is interesting to note that all these examples come from relatively early online games, indicating a clear awareness of the need to cater for communication needs among players who are likely to come from different parts of the world, speaking different languages. The application of MT in online games addresses real-time needs by gamers for interaction in multilingual environments and directly questions the limitations of today's approach to localization, which locks the user into a pre-determined language version. The need to interact in real time by gamers across languages challenges the assumption that localization is to serve the end user with products in a single fixed target locale. Some of these synchronous translation needs are increasingly being met, albeit informally, by users’ own initiatives, accessing free translation services based on MT technologies integrated into different communications platforms.
The technology's increased visibility, such as Google Translate, is likely affecting end users' perceptions about translation as an instantaneous service provided free of charge. Similarly, the players themselves may very likely "plug in" language tools as an increasing range of translation technologies become available in the public domain to fill the gap left in localization. Furthermore, the fan translator community will take advantage of any relevant tools to assist their translation effort, although such uses of technologies are not as yet reported in the literature.
As we have argued in this book, modern video games are first and foremost the products of technology applications, and game localization clearly needs to be able to keep up with the constantly unfolding technological landscape. What distinguishes localization in comparison with other forms of language transfer is that it manipulates language and culture on a dynamic digital platform. This is particularly evident in game localization, which demands that translation be part of game design and game development. It is this widened scope which makes game localization highly relevant to the concerns of Translation Studies, both in practice and in theory, giving rise to new research avenues.
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