La traduzione che non c’è. Torment: Tides of Numenera

The market of videogames has been growing more and more int the last years, reaching a revenue of more than 91 million dollars on a global scale. But while videogames enter the lives of more and more people, some companies choose to cut some languages from their internationalization projects. The project described in this dissertation analyses the case of Torment: Tides of Numenera, trying to discern the reasons that brought the developers to cut the Italian translation for the game, aiming to find how this choice has influenced the experience of Italian gamers. To this aim, the dissertation is organized in four main chapters. Chapter 2 examines the general characteristics of videogame localization, its polysemiotic nature and the added level of complexity given by the fragmentation typical of software syntax. Chapter 3 presents the details that compose the game’s identity: its genre, its predecessor and the world in which it is set. Chapter 4 contains the analysis of the actual localization project, including the technical, linguistic and textual issues faced during translation. Chapter 5 focuses instead on the reaction of the Italian public to the lack of a localization, both among the professionals of the sector and among the players. Finally, the project results are discussed, highlighting why the same reasons that bring a developer to cut the localization, also speak to the importance of a translation for the experience of Italian-speaking gamers.