Playing Cinematics: Traditional AVT Modes in a New Audiovisual Landscape

As the gaming industry is increasingly challenging Hollywood's primacy on a global scale, the audiovisual transfer of software components becomes a key issue. In this respect, while dubbing, subtitling and other audiovisual translation (hereafter AVT) modalities for cinema and television products have been established over decades of practice and polished by specialised research, studies on video game translation are still in their infancy and are being developed against a background of non-standard industry-driven practices. This contribution aims at describing new screen translation modes that are emerging in the localisation of video games by contrasting them to the AVT framework. The underlying question is not only how video games are translated, dubbed and subtitled but, more specifically, how these practices can be re-contextualised and pinned down in a new digital scenario. In order to answer this question, we will retrace the main development stages of the video game medium and chart its specific features in relation to other media, in particular to cinema. The long-established AVT modes will then be re-defined and compared to a new audiovisual landscape, in the light of specific media and operational considerations.