This section details the text selected to be translated by the participants of the study in order to see how their translation competence shows in the process. This section also details the reasoning behind the selection of this particular text as well as the text itself, what makes it a special language text worth studying and the potential translation problems related to it.
3.2.1 The motivations for selecting the research material
The text selected for the basis of the research material of this study is an online article detailing happenings in the e-sports scene of the game League of Legends. There were two
main reasons for the selection of this text as the special language text that the students were tasked with translating.
The first reason for the selection of the text was the fact that the text is written for people interested in the e-sports scene of the game League of Legends. E-sports, as detailed in chapter 2.5.1, refers to playing video games competitively for spectators. Even though the phenomenon of e-sports is gaining popularity year-by-year, it is still relatively unknown, which creates an interesting point of comparison between the translation of students who either are well-versed in the world of e-sports or completely new to the topic or even possibly something in-between.
There are multiple motivations behind selecting a text describing the e-sports scene of the game League of Legends as the text to be translated for the research material of this study.
The first motivation is the game’s popularity. According to an online article by Heimer (2019), League of Legends had 80 million players in the year 2019 and is still the most popular e-sports game by viewership, which can be seen from metrics such as the peak of 44 million concurrent viewers that tuned in online to watch the 2019 League of Legends world championship tournament (Lolesports staff, 2019). Using the most popular and well-known e-sports game as the source for the text ensures that at least a couple of the students have some prior knowledge of the game and its e-sports scene, as well as the availability of parallel texts in at least English.
The second reason for selecting this particular text to be translated as the research material of this study is that having the research material be the translation of an e-sports text provides the opportunity of studying the students’ translation strategies and choices when translating a text from a field that is not yet well established, at least in an English to Finnish setting. There is currently no established dictionary or vocabulary for e-sports terms between English and Finnish, nor is there a vocabulary even only in English, at least from an “official” source.
Sources like community-created wiki pages do offer explanations for some terms, but these might be unreliable and lacking even in a monolingual setting due to their reliance on user-submitted content. One advantage of choosing the e-sports scene of the game League of Legends as the source for the research material text is the fact that, unlike many other e-sports
games, a lot of the article content written about League is produced by the company making the game Riot Games. This means that there is a wealth of articles in English written about the e-sports scene of League available from a single official source, the e-sports center site League: lolesports.com. The usefulness of this wealth of official articles readily available remains to be seen as Riot Games does not currently offer a version of League that is localized in Finnish, nor do they offer e-sports article content in Finnish, so the translators participating in the study have to rely on unofficial sources, if they wish to seek existing translations for e-sports terms related to League.
3.2.2 The source text of the translation
This section aims to detail and describe the text (Appendix 1) whose translation is used as the research material of this study. This section will go over the content of the text, its background and why it was selected to be translated for the research material of this study.
First, the background of the text is explored.
The source material for the translation serving as the research material for this study is a part of the article Connect Four: Team Liquid wins again (Lam, 2019). The text was published on the nexus.leaguefolegends.com/esports website, which is the site where all of the e-sports related articles published by Riot Games, the company that created the game League of Legends, are gathered. The imaginary background to the translation task given to the participants was that Riot Games wants to offer a Finnish translation of their e-sports site, which includes all of the articles published there.
As previously mentioned, the text to be translated by the students is a part of a larger article.
The part consists of 343 words in three paragraphs. The text describes a competitive match in the game League of Legends between the team Cloud 9 and Team Liquid. The initial hypothesis was that the students view the translation as fairly difficult, depending on how much experience they have in both League of Legends and e-sports as a whole. This hypothesis, too proved to be incorrect, as only 1 participant rated the study’s difficulty as more than 3 on a scale of 1–5. As mentioned in Majanen (2018), there is a difference in the
language and terminology in video games in comparison to e-sports. This can be clearly seen in the example sentence taken from the text (Lam, 2019):
Thanks to Kled’s ultimate, C9 managed to severely limit the space TL could safely maneuver on the map, which allowed them to choke out vision and secure enough Barons to eventually close out the game, even though they lost a couple of fights during sieges due to sloppiness.
This sentence combines elements both from the game and the e-sports scene of the game. On one hand expressions like Kled’s ultimate and Barons require knowledge of League and/or information searching in order to translate properly, or possibly not translate if the translator so chooses according to their strategy, as, according to Costales (2012), depending on the game being localized, translators can choose either domestication or foreignization. On the other hand expressions like choke out vision and sieges require knowledge and/or information gathering of the e-sports scene of League. Kled’s ultimate refers to a player-controlled character’s ultimate ability. Barons refer to a worm-like creature on the in-game map that awards the team of players that kills it with a temporary advantage of the game, instead of referring to humans with the rank of a baron. Choke out vision refers to players eliminating the opposing team’s wards from the map. These wards can be placed on the in-game map and they provide the owning team an area of vision around themselves. Sieges refer to a team attacking the opposing team’s base and slowly pushing into the base while destroying defensive structures belonging to the opposing team. The special language content of the source text is further explored in Chapter 4. There are 10 special language terms picked from the source text whose translations are analyzed. These terms are: split, draft strategy, solo laner, gank, lane, bot lane, dive, Baron, ability and bruiser
3.2.3 The translation comment
In addition to the text translation, the participants of the study were also asked to fill out a translation comment and attach it to their translation. The full translation comment template can be seen in Appendix 2. The function of the translation comment is to provide more information about the participating student’s familiarity with the game League of Legends, as
well as e-sports in general. It also provides information on, for example, how much translation experience the participating student has. The translation comment template also includes questions about the translation process like time spent on the translation and macro and micro level translation strategies the participating student used. The students were also asked to name any parts of the translation they found especially hard to translate and how they resolved the issue.
Now that the motivations, methods and the research material itself have been discussed the study can move on to analyzing the completed translations of the article. In the next chapter, chapter 4, the study will highlight the completed translations and compare them against each other. The focus of chapter 4 will be on analyzing the translations in term of how the translator’s strategic sub-competence can be seen in the translation and how different levels of the translators’ subject-knowledge of e-sports or the game League of Legends affects that display of competence.