A/P Minako O’Hagan – Making Pokémon Go in Another Language and Culture

Abstract: Digital games have penetrated the world as mainstream contemporary entertainment and playing games has become a social phenomenon. This has been recently demonstrated by the augmented reality game Pokémon Go which has reportedly exceeded 75 million downloads since its release in July 2016. Behind the games’ global success lies, albeit little acknowledged, translation. In this presentation I discuss game localisation which is a relatively new domain of research in Translation Studies (O’Hagan and Mangiron 2013) and elsewhere. Game localisation refers to the whole complex process of adapting a game made in one country to sell in another so players all over the world can enjoy games originally made in other language and cultural contexts. Given the complex nature of modern games as sophisticated technological and cultural artefacts, game localisation research seeks to be multidisciplinary and provides ample scope for exploration from a multitude of perspectives. In this presentation I will discuss my current work in the field, mainly focused on user experience of localised games, which led to innovating methodologies as well as seeking new theoretical frameworks. For example, my experimentation has taken me in the direction of Emotion (Kansei) Engineering (e.g. Lévy 2013;Nagamachi 2011) to gauge effect-oriented user response to localised games while applying sociology-inspired frameworks such as Critical Theory of Technology (Grimes and Feenberg 2013) to analyse the relationship between technology and users. To this end, I hope to map out key research agenda for game localisation in an attempt to provide a platform for future collaboration among scholars with different expertise to tackle this fascinating, complex and edgy modern pursuit.”

A/P O’Hagan’s biographical information can be found here.