ABSTRACT
Video games have become ever-present in digital life today with thousands of deeply invested players and fans. As a major form of entertainment and an impactful media, they influence and shape the global culture and way of life in contemporary digital society. Within a span of five decades, video games have evolved into a multi-billion-dollar industry, the economic and cultural globalization of which has made video game localization an essential part of the production cycle. As sophisticated technology-driven new media, video games have unique features that pose challenges to translators technically, linguistically, and culturally in the process of localization, which requires diverse approaches and multiple skills. As an emerging field of research in translation studies, video game localization has been drawing increasing attention. The past two decades, in particular, have delivered a proliferation of scholarly discussions that have significantly deepened the understanding of game localization both as a translation practice and a research domain. This chapter provides a snapshot of the current landscape in game localization research and highlights future directions.
