Translation Solutions in Professional Video Game Localization in Iran

Widely played all over the world, video games have led to a thriving industry whose global boom owes much to the significant contributions of audiovisual translation and game localization. The current study sheds some light on the translation solutions employed in tailoring video games into Persian to evaluate the growing field of game localization in Iran. Accordingly, four video games localized by Darinoos, the most prominent Iranian game localization company, were selected; their textual materials were extracted and compiled into a corpus of 3068 source–target pairs. The results showed Copying Structure is the most frequently used solution indicating the prominence of word-for-word translation. Cultural Correspondence, on the other hand, was revealed to have received the lowest proportion suggesting the lack of creativity and failure to transfer culture-specific language. The findings revealed several inadequacies in video game localization into Persian, which are explored within the cultural and industrial settings of Iran.