Cultural Adaptation in Video Game Localization : An Analysis of Cutscene Scripts in Japanese and itsTranslation to English of the game Lost Judgement

Cultural adaptation and free translation strategies are more common to use within the field of video game localization although they are still not recommended too veruse in translation studies. Free translation strategies are commonly used invideo game localization to make video games ready for a targeted audience. As free translation is mostly target-oriented in video game localization, the original source text often loses its meaning because of culturally adapting and modifying the text to fit to the target culture. This study aims to analyze 10 chosen cutscenes of the video game Lost Judgement, to find how frequently cultural adaptation and free translation strategies were used for pragmatic (proper names, cultural termsand expressions, allusion) and interlingual (regional dialect and slang) translation problems and how these problems were solved. The result and analysis of the study demonstrate examples of these translation problems within chosen cutscenes. The examples prove that depending on translation problems, both free translation and cultural adaptation can be used in combination with a literal word-for-word translation strategy. It also indicates that the video localization of Lost Judgement implied to use both domestication and foreignization approaches to achieve a higher satisfaction for the players of the game who can choose their favorite version. Another important factor was that the localization of the videogame focused on a functional approach whose purpose was to keep loyalty to the original text, the source text.