De fã para fã: as traduções de Chrono Trigger no Brasil

Abstract

Nowadays, video games involve an entire global entertainment market, in a similar manner to the film industry. Certain video game genres, largely RPGs and strategy games, rely strongly on textual components as a basis for their gameplay. Together, these two factors have generated significant demand for linguistic transference and differing degrees of adaptation to specific markets – a process known as localization. However, the localization industry does not consider this process affordable for many languages, leaving a door open for amateur attempts at translating games. This thesis provides a descriptive analysis of two Brazilian fan translations of Chrono Trigger (1995),which were based on the first official translation of that game from Japanese into English.In order to carry out this research, Venuti‘s (1995) theory of the transator‘s invisibility and Nord‘s (1994) concept of cultural markers were used to analyze topics such as dialogue additions and omissions, the re–creation of play on words, the renaming of characters and terminology, censored items, the deliberate use of idiomatic expressions and offenses, in addition toother challenges that Chrono Trigger presented to the fan translators. Results show us that fan translations are prone to include many cultural markers from the target language and also to use, in general, domesticative translation strategies.