THE PROBLEMS OF VIDEO GAMES TRANSLATION INTO THE UKRAINIAN LANGUAGE

Abstract

The study outlines a number of problems faced by the translator when translating video games from the English language into the Ukrainian language. The demand for entertainment software is growing, and at the same time, it is encouraging video game creators to translate more of their products. However, in order to achieve a high level of popularization, the nature of multimedia interactive entertainment software products requires special translation, i.e. localization. Localization of video games is a complex process that is not sufficiently researched to date. The article attempts to determine the nature of the difficulties faced by the translator, such as the choice of translation strategies, the translation of cultural realities, the translation of the comic, and others. Attention is focused on the fact that semantic errors are often made during localization, which in their turn are divided into gross distortion of the original content, inaccuracy and ambiguity, and linguistic errors, among which lexical, grammatical, stylistic, spelling and punctuation errors can be singled out. We conclude that in order to achieve the adequacy of the translation, it is necessary to apply skillfully a number of translation transformations, namely transliteration, transcription, loaning (when translating proper names, names of objects, phenomena, events, localities), as well as search for effective approaches to the adaptation of various cultural aspects and historical features, during which transcreation (creative translation) turns out to be apt.