浅析国产视觉小说游戏英译的翻译策略——以国产独立游戏《WILL：美好世界》开题报告

1. Reasons for the study on translation in Chinese gamesWith the rise of the level of average national incomes, the recreative need of people trends to multi-mediumization and digitization. According to some official researches in 2018, the entire income of Chinese game industry has experienced a slower increase, yet the actual sales revenue of Chinese game market reached up to 23.6% of that of the global game market. In the last year, some Chinese game enterprises had already succeeded abroad because of abundant resources and fine-quality products, and the mushrooming of Chinese independent game teams indicated that the environment for producing games improved and the game quality would be well-polished.Yet games containing Chinese traditional elements barely reach foreign players. On the contrary, the western symbolic images and playing angles prevail in many well-known games, not only because of the richness of the creativity and innovation, the detailed world systems and its massive audiences, like World of Warcraft or Call of Duty, but the efforts on translation. A Chinese game producer once admitted that she had long ignored the importance as well as difficulties in translating her game. Sweat on translation can be a bonus. The interest and social effect that developing a game brings are underestimated for a long time. Many domestic companies are prone to buy directly the agency of a “3A game”. However, the interest and social effect that developing a game brings can be enormous.2. Reasons for study on visual novel game (VNG)Visual novel game is a kind of game in which the message is delivered by various means, for example, texts, pictures and music, etc.In traditional paper novels, the chuncky sentences are piled up in a single page, which discourage easily the readers. On the contrary, the sentences in a VNG appear successively to keep players focused all along while not losing its interest.VNGs can be haply divided into two kinds: VNGs on narrow sense and VNGs on broad sense. The former merely refers to games narrating stories using the screen for display words as much as possible, while the later means games telling the tales with words and images.Generally speaking, there are two kinds of VNG. The first one refers to those games which require no or very few interactions between players and games. In this case, all the players need to do is click the ‘next’ button to reach the following/ensuing sentence of whole scenario. When it comes to the second kind, the interaction is a key factor to reach the ending. For example, the gamers are usually demanded to select the ‘right one’ among different texts or reorder the shuffling paragraphs in a letter. Sometimes phrases or sentences in a seemingly fluent paragraph can also be replaced to get into a brand-new plot.VNG developers usually tend to arrange some key options for players. These choices can be decisive to change the direction of the following plot. In this way developers managed to enhance player’s immersive experience and improve the quality of the games.VNGs specialize in the abundance of text, refined characterization and attractive plots, which fits the study in translation strategies.3. Introduction to WILL: A Wonderful World WILL: A Wonderful World is a narrative and creative VNG. In the game, human writes down their difficulties as well as wishes into a letter and God will receive it. Players are to be in the role of God and to change the senders’ fate in the way of re-ordering the sentences of each mails.Famitsu (《ファミ通》) refers to Japanese game magazines published by Enterbrain, and Weekly Famitsu (《週刊ファミ通》), regarded as the most respectable video game news magazine in Japan, is the earlies magazine of Enterbrain. Famitsu is famous in extremely strictly scoring new video games, which are marked ranging from 1 to 10 points by a group of 4 video game critics. The full mark is 40.WILL: A Wonderful World was scored at 34(8/8/9/9) points, who unfortunately missed the occasion entering Great Master Grade (35 points), yet it is a remarkable game. Last year, its producer published the English version, who has witnessed 3 times of translation and proofreading, in order to appeal the attention of English-speaking players.