Norms governing the localization of video games

Garshasp: Temple of the Dragon (2012) is a 3D, 3rd person action-adventure hack ‘n’ slash indie game developed by Dead Mage for English gamers and Fanafzar Sharif for local use. It was one of the early Persian forerunners to be majorly localized and distributed throughout the English community. It takes a mythology that westerners are probably not familiar with and presents it in a third person action setting that most audiences can understand (MetaCritic 2012). This and more is what Garshasp offers from its home country demonstrated through its lovely art design, pompous music, and a great narrator (GameSpot 2012). The present research investigates the norms governing the ‘language’ of Garshasp: Temple of the Dragon; a prequel to its 2011 Garshasp: The Monster Slayer. Toury (1978/2000) proposed various categories of norms among which ‘initial norms’ is our concern. These norms represents the side translators subject themselves to; source (adequacy) or target (acceptability). In other words, the initial norm refers to “the translator’s (conscious or unconscious) choice as to the main objective of his translation, the objective which governs all decisions made during the translation process” (van Leuven- Zwart 1989, 154). Van Leuven-Zwart (1989) also contents that, as is the case with most other norms, the initial norm is not directly observable, but may be inferred by identifying the shifts contained in target text. Using Toury’s categorization (1978/2000) and a modified Vinay and Darbelnet’s model (1958/1995), we found that the language of the video game under study tends to be more acceptable than adequate.