Janky or non-fluent?

At a time when China is one of the world’s largest videogame markets, the English translation of some Chinese-developed videogames is still regarded by some players as inadequate, or “janky”, the term originally used to describe a technical glitch (Cooper 2018Cooper, Ryan. 2018. The joy of jank. Unwinnable. Accessed May. [URL]). This preliminary study surveyed localisation specialists active in Chinese into English (ZH-EN) videogame localisation to probe into their localisation methods and the reasons behind them, and determine whether localisers indeed used a “janky” translation as the result of lack of experience and training, or whether it was a deliberate translation decision, as in “non-fluent” translation (Brownlie 2010Brownlie, Siobhan. 2010. “Committed Approaches and Activism.” In Handbook of Translation studies by Yves Gambier and Luc Van Doorslaer, eds. John Benjamins: 45–48. ). The collected data was analysed to investigate the plausibility of the assumption that Chinese-developed videogames rendered into English sometimes employ marked English, as in China English, to intentionally identify them as Chinese-made. Results of the explorative small-scale survey of professionals were found to be largely in favour of optimal English fluency, including the omission of culturally locked elements such as idiomatic phrases, suggesting that “janky”, rather than “non-fluent”, translation resulted, most likely due to a limited experience and lapses in quality assurance.