Janky or non-fluent? A small-scale practitioner survey on Chinese-English videogame localisation approaches

Abstract At a time when China is one of the world’s largest videogame markets, the English translation of some Chinese-developed videogames is still regarded by some players as inadequate, or “janky”, the term originally used to describe a technical glitch ( Cooper 2018 ). This preliminary study surveyed localisation specialists active in Chinese into English (ZH-EN) videogame localisation to probe into their localisation methods and the reasons behind them, and determine whether localisers indeed used a “janky” translation as the result of lack of experience and training, or whether it was a deliberate translation decision, as in “non-fluent” translation ( Brownlie 2010 ). The collected data was analysed to investigate the plausibility of the assumption that Chinese-developed videogames rendered into English sometimes employ marked English, as in China English, to intentionally identify them as Chinese-made. Results of the explorative small-scale survey of professionals were found to be largely in favour of optimal English fluency, including the omission of culturally locked elements such as idiomatic phrases, suggesting that “janky”, rather than “non-fluent”, translation resulted, most likely due to a limited experience and lapses in quality assurance.