POPULAR CULTURE ALLUSIONS IN VIDEO GAMES. THE TYPOLOGY OF ALLUSIONS AND THEIR LOCALIZATION

Arishchenko Stanislav

This article analyzes the typology of existing popular culture allusions in video games and suggests possible ways of transferring allusions from one language localization to another. The main task of any kind of allusion is to trigger a certain set of emotions in gamer’s mind at a particular moment of the gameplay. The range of evoked emotions is pretty wide, but it is possible to distinguish the most common types of emotions: surprise, joy and nostalgia. In turn, the task of localization is to evoke an identical range of emotions in the mind of a player, who are playing particular video game in the target language. Allusion localization seems to be a complicated and not always expedient process, but there are several well-established localization techniques, for instance: subtitling and translation annotations.

Keywords:mass culture, allusion, video game localization, translation methods, translation strategies, subtitling