Translating Video Games with Historical Content, or Researching to Rewrite History

Abstract

Within the varied sector of video games, there is one type of game, i.e. games with historical content, that could help refine the claim made by Mangiron and O’Hagan (2006) that video games give the translator a particularly high degree of freedom to stray from the source text. In the present article, I try to demonstrate that this type of game may generally require more research than creativity, due to the game’s realism, which limits the translator’s freedom. The article’s conclusions, drawn primarily from examples taken from the Spanish version of the US game Age of Empires iii, place games with historical content alongside those based on children’s books, where the translator’s freedom is limited by the fact that translation is conditioned by the official translation of the literary works the products are based on (Bernal-Merino, 2009)