Translating Literature into Playability: The case of Dante’s Inferno

From the perspective of Game Localisation (O'Hagan and Mangiron 2013, Bernal-Merino 2015), this paper examines the translation of Dante's Inferno (Electronic Arts 2010) from English into Italian. Parallel excerpts from in-game dialogues are compared in order to analyse the relationship between the source and the target texts, while exploring the influence Dante's masterpiece exerts on the Italian localisation. The objective is to show that, when a game is based the target culture literature, the latter seems to constrain translation to ensure a successful local impact. As findings suggest, by means of quotations together with lexical, syntactic and stylistic choices, the Italian game is more literarily expressive than its English source, thus providing players with a multimedia interactive Dantesque experience