Volunteer vs. Professional Community Translation in Video Game Localization: The Case of the Steam Translation Server in Turkish

Abstract

In the last two decades, audiovisual translation has come to be employed in an ever-widening range of contexts and media, an expansion which has been more or less reflected in research. Meanwhile, video game localization and the volunteer translation communities responsible for it have become popular research topics around the world. In Turkey, despite the existence of both volunteer communities and professional localization companies, academic studies on video game localization are scarce. To help fill this gap in the literature, the present study aims to explore the potential similarities and differences between community translation processes in volunteer and professional video game localization in Turkey. To this end, two group interviews were carried out: one with members of a volunteer video game localization community operating within the Steam Translation Server, the other with the representatives of a professional localization company in Istanbul, Turkey. The localization processes reported by the respondents were compared in the light of the typologies and processes of community translation presented in the literature. The findings from the interviews indicated that the video game localization processes followed by the two communities resembled one another in terms of management, participation, and closed community structure, but the volunteer community sometimes displayed more flexibility in these aspects and did not seem to set such strict standards. The findings thus suggest that theories of community translation need to take more account of both common and distinguishing features of online communities and offer new categorizations for blended community structures.