Videogame localization. A case study: Final Fantasy XII

Globalization has influenced all economic sectors and the demand for translation services has increased like never before. The videogame industry has become a worldwide phenomenon worth billions. Many people around the globe, male and female, children and adults alike, choose this leisure activity and enjoy it like reading or watching a film. It is a global phenomenon capable of producing as much revenue and anticipation as the film industry. Most games are developed in Japanese or English and the new global market requires this product to be translated into many other languages. The scenario has brought about a new field of specialization in translation studies, commonly known as videogame localization. The emergence of this new field calls not only for a review of translation studies, but also a shift in the role that some translators and translated products are expected to play within a globalized world. The aim of this dissertation is to provide an overview of videogame localization and its challenges under the guidance of a professional translator such as Alexander O. Smith, who agreed to provide counsel through several Skype interviews. This provided a first-hand insight into how translation decisions are carried out by game translators. Alexander O. Smith was a former translator for Square Enix, one of the biggest Japanese videogame developer, publisher and distribution company in the market. He now works as an independent translator and in 2003 he founded the localization agency called Kajiya Productions with his friend and fellow translator Joseph Reeder. Together with Alexander O. Smith, the twelfth installment of the Final Fantasy series by Square Enix has been chosen as a very good example of the issues and challenges brought on by videogame localization. The game which revealed itself to be one of the most fun, challenging and rewarding professional experiences of Alexander O. Smith.

A text mining approach to materiality assessment

Worldwide companies currently make a significant effort in performing the materiality analysis, whose aim is to explain corporate sustainability in an annual report. Materiality reflects what are the most important social, economic and environmental issues for a company and its stakeholders. Many studies and standards have been proposed to establish what are the main steps to follow to identify the specific topics to be included in a sustainability report. However, few existing quantitative and structured approaches help understanding how to deal with the identified topics and how to prioritise them to effectively show the most valuable ones. Moreover, the use of traditional approaches involves a long-lasting and complex procedure where a lot of people have to be reached and interviewed and several companies' reports have to be read to extrapolate the material topics to be discussed in the sustainability report. This dissertation aims to propose an automated mechanism to gather stakeholders and the company's opinions identifying relevant issues. To accomplish this purpose, text mining techniques are exploited to analyse textual documents written by either a stakeholder or the reporting company. It is then extracted a measure of how much a document deals with some defined topics. This kind of information is finally manipulated to prioritise topics based on how the author's opinion matters. The entire work is based upon a real case study in the domain of telecommunications.

La traduzione al servizio dell'internazionalizzazione: la localizzazione in cinese del sito web di Leonori S.r.l.

The participation in the Language Toolkit program—a joint initiative of the Department of Interpretation and Translation of Forlì (University of Bologna) and the Chamber of Commerce of Romagna—led to the creation of this dissertation. This program aims to support the internationalization of SMEs while also introducing near-graduates to a real professional context. The author collaborated on this project with Leonori, a company that produces and sells high jewelry products online and through retailers. The purpose of this collaboration is to translate and localize a part of the company website from Italian into Chinese, so as to facilitate their internationalization process to Chinese-speaking countries. This dissertation is organized according to the usual stages a translator goes through when carrying out a translation task. First and foremost, however, it was necessary to provide a theoretical background pertaining to the topics of the project. Specifically, the first chapter introduces the Language Toolkit program, the concept of internationalization and the company itself. The second chapter is dedicated to the topic of inverse translation, including the advantages and disadvantages of this practice. The third chapter highlights the main features of localization, with a particular emphasis on web localization. The fourth chapter deals with the analysis of the source text, according to the looping model developed by Nord (1991). The fifth chapter describes in detail the methods implemented for the creation of the language resources i.e., two comparable monolingual corpora and a termbase, which were built ad hoc for this specific project. In the sixth chapter all the translation strategies that were implemented are outlined, providing some examples from the source text. The final chapter describes the revision process, which occurred both during and after the translation phase.