Creativity and readability in game localisation. A case study on "Ni No Kuni"

This paper analyses the Italian transcreation strategies for the subtitles of the video game Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch, to detail how the diatopic/diastratic variety of Romanesco (typical of Rome and its area) is adopted for the characterisation of Mr Drippy, in order to prompt a humorous effect due to the cognitive contrast (Attardo 2001) triggered by the counterfactual creature speaking an actual linguistic variety. The Italian script will also be examined from the pragmatic and technical perspectives, showing that the transcreative retextualisations are tailored to younger receivers, since explanations and alternative utterances are added to render the speakers’ intentionality more explicit, and noticing that the distribution of the longer target script in two- and three-line subtitles may arouse concerns in terms of readability (Perego, Taylor 2012). An alternative Italian translation strategy is then presented, where creativity and the respect for the source-text multimodal dimension are balanced to provide an equivalent characterisation for Raj, a man speaking with an Indian accent. Finally, the receivers’ perception of the conventional Italian transcreation strategies of humorous discourse in video games will be explored, by considering the players’ opinions and comments in dedicated websites.