Localization Practices in Trading Card Games, Magic: the gathering from English into Portuguese

Abstract

The localization of a long-lasting and often updated Trading Card Game (TCG) such as Magic: The Gathering (USA, 2003-present) requires specific and detailed translation for consistency, while following certain policies. A parallel, bilingual corpus was created to observe technical constraints and localization policies pertaining to its translation into Brazilian Portuguese. The text of 249 cards in each language was extracted, aligned, and analyzed using Wordsmith 3.0 and Notepad++, with theoretical support of a translation description model (Lambert and Van Gorp) adapted for the genre. Macro and micro analyses both resulted in a translation product that is linguistically adequate to the target system, but not acceptable in the target cultural system. Also, some sections of the product require less rigidity in relation to the game rules and could benefit from transcreation.

Keywords

• translation practices. localization. trading card games. magic the gathering.