THE ASPECTS OF LOCALISATION FROM JAPANESE FOR WESTERN AUDIENCE ON THE EXAMPLE OF VIDEO GAME “XENOBLADE CHRONICLES 2”

The video game industry is enjoying an exceedingly high level of interest coming from all the different age groups, be it children, teenagers or adults. It is now perfectly common for people all over the globe to indulge in so-called “gaming” in their leisure time, which makes video game development one of the most prosperous trades at present. However, there is one issue that has ceaselessly been a bane of the industry since its very beginning, and the name of it is “localisation”.Notwithstanding where they come from, people want to experience media in the language they are able to understand. Nonetheless, it is generally not sufficient to plainly translate a piece of media. The translation needs to be adapted in accordance with the linguistic realia of the target audience to become comprehensible to the said audience. Localisation is the process that does precisely that.The eastern culture is indisputably vastly different from the western and the Japanese one is no exception. Japan is one of the world's leading video game producers, which makes the problem of Japanese games localisation exceptionally relevant nowadays.In other words, the relevance of this research lies in the fact that Japanese games (while being marketable all over the world) frequently employ the realia that are peculiar to Japan alone or that are non-existent in the western culture altogether, resulting in the excessive need for appropriate localisation.The objective of this research is to demonstrate on the example of video game “Xenoblade Chronicles 2” that translation and localisation is not always one and the same thing and that sometimes realia cannot be adapted without (partly or completely) losing their initial significance. To evaluate the results of the research, a survey was conducted. The respondents were to choose between two variants: a more or less literal translation of a piece of text, containing some kind of cultural realia, and its localised version. In some cases, the respondents were provided with the context, in others they were not, in order to evaluate the need for a certain degree of cultural literacy in picking a preferred way of translation.