Tradução e localização de jogos: normas de expectativas e profissionais em Uncharted 4

Abstract

Game translation and localization are practices with deep ties to global marketing and business operations, allowing these products to cross complex sociocultural and linguistic barriers and reach players from a growing set of locales (O’Hagan; Mangiron, 2013). Aware of its diverse target audience and the profit gained by distributing its products in these markets, the game industry has made ever-growing investments in localized and translated version for its titles, in a practice that has already felt the impact of the users’ expectancy norms (Chesterman, 1997), as was evidenced by the study presented by Coelho (2016). From this perspective and bearing in mind the results obtained in the author’s previous research, this study sought to investigate how these norms are reflected in the comments made by the players about a fully-localized version in pt-BR of the game Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End, a direct sequel to the object of study previously analyzed by the author. The results obtained from the analysis of the players’ comments aimed to shed light on the relation between the internal and external knowledge (Pym, 2004 apud O’Hagan; Mangiron, 2013) of the agents involved in the localization and translation of that material, allowing for an understanding of what the Brazilian users expect from a translated game and what is actually feasible under the current professional norms of the field (Chesterman, 1997), besides offering an insight into how these norms evolved by comparing the results with those obtained in the 2016 monograph.