having taken into account the target audience’s familiarity with anglicisms were translators 6 and 7 who had no formal translator training or experience.
Also related to the first observation was that translators 6 and 7 both used omission in order to avoid some special language terms. This, however, led to translation errors in both translations. Translator 6 omitted the term lane, which led to sentences like Combined with an early gank on bot lane very early in the game being translated into Tähän yhditettynä varhaisessa vaiheessa tullut gänkki, which contains less information than the original.
Translator 7 on the other hand omitted the term gank from the same sentence and translated it into Tämä yhdistettynä bottilinjan varhaisen hallinnan kanssa, which conveys completely different information than the original sentence as it loses the mention of a gank happening.
The second observation was related to the term dive used in the source text. In the competitive scene of League of Legends the term tower dive is used to describe an action where one or more players attack the character of an opposing team under their turret, which is more commonly known as tower. In the source text of the study the term tower dive was referred to as dive. The term dive was noticeably the most varied term when it came to ways it was translated. All 8 translators had a different solution for the term, with only translator 5 leaving it untranslated. This result is further explored in Table 2 below.
Table 2: the translation for the term dive by the participants
Translator number Translation of the term dive
1 syöksy
2 sukellus
3 tornihyökkäys
4 hyökkäys
5 dive
6 taistelu
7 koukku
8 ryntäys
Translator 3 was curiously the only translator who had brought the word tower back into the translation of the term, translating it into tornihyökkäys. This is probably due to translator 3’s extensive information gathering, as they rated their familiarity on League of Legends as 2 and noted that they had never played the game. Translator 5, who had rated their familiarity with League as 5 was the only other translator that explicitly mentioned debating the use of a translation that contained the word tower in the form of tornisukellus but ultimately decided to leave the term untranslated.
The third observation is related to the translators’ experience and familiarity with League of Legends. Translation 6 and 7 stand out in comparison with the other six translations in terms of their strategy as discussed earlier. Interestingly, translator 6 had a familiarity of 5 with League, while translator 7 had a familiarity of 3. Translator 6 had used omission, leaving the original untranslated and using the Finnish spoken language form of the original as their main term translation strategies, while translator 7 mostly used domestication. Compared to translations 6 and 7 there were not major differences in approach or term translation in the other six translations. Notably, translator 8 who had 3 years of experience and a familiarity of 1 had the most cases of translated terms not corresponding to the meaning of the original, possibly due to their unfamiliarity with the game. Translators 3 and 4, who both had a familiarity of 2, were the only ones that had translated the term Baron, which is capitalized due to it being a proper noun, into paroni. Translator 5, with a familiarity of 5, had translated the term but kept the capitalization of the name.
In summary, the main takeaway from the analysis seems to be that the translations by translators who have no formal experience have the most problems relating to the translation strategy used. Despite having a clear difference in the strategy regarding term translation, translator 6 and 7 both failed to take the target audience of the translation into account, which led to problems in their translations. Differences in the translation made by translators who had formal experience had major differences only in terms of the term translations, stemming from the translators’ familiarity with the subject of the source and target text. The translations
that had the least problems were done by translators that both had translation experience and were familiar with the subject.
5 Conclusion
The aim of this study was to look at translation students’ translation competence through their work on a translation of a special language text. The process of the study was not without problems as one of the hardest parts of the study was the collection of voluntary participants and their translations. In the end the aim of only analyzing translation by translation students was not completed, as two of the eight participants in the study were students of English language and culture, instead of translation. Interestingly, the addition of two non-translation students of English offered a good point of comparison between the two types of participants.
The major findings of the study were in league with the findings and hypotheses of the PACTE group (PACTE, 2017) and Neubert (2000) in that the two participating students who did not have formal translation experience produced the least prototypical translations because their translations failed to take into account the target audience of the study, which implies a lack of strategic competence. The six students who did have formal translation experience all considered the target audience of the translation in their choice of strategy and the major differences between the translations stemmed from how familiar the translator was with the subject of the source text: e-sports. This finding emphasizes the importance of the subject knowledge competence. Even the two students who had no prior translation experience produced greatly differing translations due to the difference in their level of familiarity with the subject.
Interestingly, all eight students who participated in the study had at least some prior knowledge of the game League of Legends with only one translator marking their familiarity level 1 on a scale of 1 to 5 and even that student was aware of the existence of the game prior to participation. Such high familiarity is a testament to the historically large popularity of League throughout the years and the growth of e-sports in general. In terms of strategies or term translation there were no noticeable differences between students who had studied translation but were not familiar with the subject, apart from translator 8 who, as previously mentioned, had the most cases of term translations not corresponding to the original in terms of meaning. These findings show that strategic and subject knowledge competence seem to increase through translation education. Students learn to use strategies appropriate to the
target audience of the study and learn to find and utilize sources of information to cover gaps in their knowledge of a subject. Conversely, subject knowledge alone does not ensure an appropriate translation if the translator has no prior education or experience.
Despite the initial plan of only using translation students as participants in the study, two of the participants ended up being students of English but not translation students. This worked well in terms of analysis as the translation of those two students provided valuable data on the differences between the actions of students with translation training and those without. In a hypothetical or future setting this study could have been aiming from the beginning to observe the differences between translators and non-translators and it could have been conducted with a greater amount of participants with an even split between translation and non-translation students, including some students, of both translation and not, who had absolutely no familiarity with League of Legends. Indeed, with only modifications to the amount and type of participants this study could in the future provide much more results that can be used to study translation competence. Also modifying the type of research material used in future studies could provide information on different aspects of translation competence that this study did not touch on. The results of this study could also be used as a basis for hypotheses that can be tested in further studies.
As Reitman et al. (2019) noted in their study, e-sports research is a subject of growing popularity, owing to the growth of the phenomenon itself. E-sports research attracts studies from a multitude of different disciplines and now with this study, if it had not already then, even translation studies belongs to that long list of disciplines unified by the common interest in e-sports research. This study provides a good point for continued research on both e-sports translation and special language translation. A topic of e-sports translation that has previously eluded research, at least to my knowledge, is the work interpreters in the world of e-sports.
Major e-sports events gather players from all over the world and interpreters are utilized across all of e-sports to provide translations for the millions of fans watching.
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