The uncharted territory in Uncharted 3: expectancy vs. Professional norms in translated games

Game localization and translation have an intricate connection with global business and marketing operations, allowing these products to cross complex sociocultural and linguistic borders and reach players from a growing variety of territories (O’Hagan and Mangiron, 2013). Aware of the diversity of its target audience and the profit provided by the distribution of its products in these locales, the game industry has increasingly invested in localization and translation for its titles. Although this is still a relatively new strategy, game localization and translation already witness the impact of expectancy and professional norms (Chesterman, Memes of Translation, “Bridge Concepts in Translation Sociology”). This study aimed to investigate how these norms operate and converge by analyzing the game Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception and the comments made by players about its fully localized version in Brazilian Portuguese. The results obtained from the analysis of gameplay and comments shed light on the relationship between expectancy and professional norms across the agents involved in the localization and translation of this sort of materials, which allowed for a better understanding both of what Brazilian users expect from a translated game and of what is actually done according to the professional norms.