Aglutinação e justaposição como recursos tradutórios no jogo Pokémon Platinum

Abstract

Game Translation, similarly to subtitling, also faces constraints regarding character limit. This research focuses on a restriction involving text boxes that accommodate only 12 characters. The game we analyzed was Pokémon Platinum, from the Pokémon franchise, one of the most widely well-known gaming franchises in the world. The moves in this game cannot surpass the 12-character limit in order to fit in the text boxes shown on the screen. Pokémon Platinum has never been translated into Portuguese, but the anime, the manga, and the mobile game Pokémon Go have. Thus, there are official translations in Portuguese for these moves, but not all of them fit in the 12-character limit present in the game. The purpose of this project is to use compounding, a method of word formation, which is found in the Italian translation of Pokémon Platinum, to solve this translation issue. Bechara (2019) says that, in Portuguese, compounds are more common in morphological processes and that blend words are usually used when vowel overlapping does not seem unnatural. Building on the latest Portuguese Language Orthographic Agreement, we proposed translation solutions through compound and blend words for the analyzed moves whose translations in other types of media from the franchise did not respect the 12-character limit of the game. Assuming these moves as part of the terminology from the Pokémon universe, we conducted a survey in order to assess if some of our proposed translations represented well the moves they referred to. Through these results and the analyses we conducted, we learned that compounding is an efficient solution to translation problems involving character limit when used consciously.