Month: April 2009

translation or localization

There’s very little work done on translation and language within gaming. What is mostly done is relegated to celebratory domestication work claiming how poor games sell when the “translation” doesn’t take the target culture into consideration. This of course leads to an understanding that language is negligible next to sale values; that the good translation hides behind the play; that translation is in fact simply localization.

Localization is taking a product and altering it to sell to a local audience. It is a business term that is intricately tied to economics and politics. On the economic, a good localization is one that sells well: change is good as long as it sells more. On the political, a good localization is one that is acceptable within an audience: censoring is a good thing. Within gaming, translation is a matter of localization and has always been so due to the commercial nature of games. In order to problematize such a combination one must either separate gaming from commercial endeavor (something constantly under attempt by serious games, art games, et cetera), or problematize the aspect of new media that focuses on variability to the detriment of difference.

Manovich’s variability claim argues that new media has no original. There’s no original, but then again, there’s also no secondary as all are parts of the same code and property. Thus, within a logic of variability changing the language of a game is a matter of localizing the new media text that otherwise does not change.

The problem with this understanding is that it takes out intention within the language itself. Games have intentions other than play, and an aspect of this intentionality is the language used within it. By focusing on pleasurable flow toward an audience and justifying this through an understanding of games as variable new media such intentionality of the original writer is unfortunately removed. In order to reinsert an idea of intention, if not an origin, it becomes necessary to focus on the concept of translation instead of localization.

birthwrong

An idea that I have been muling over in my head for a while is a reaction to the birthright policy of Israel. I have never been comfortable with the way that policy betweenZionist law of return, Israel and the United States have operated in relationship to my own person. It has never been a strong revolt, but a deep seated distrust. Ironically, it is the same distrust that I place on simple nationalism and its essential, exclusionary principles: you can’t have a nation without marking ideological/subjective borders; you can’t have a state without marking territorial borders. As such, it makes perfect sense that the process of defining Israel as a nation-state necessitates both the marking of boundaries on the land and with/in individuals. While I can deal with such markings in theory, I have a problem when the practice of territoriality then attempts to bring me into its rhetoric, essentially  pushing accountability onto me.

The law of return, as I understand it, claims that all Jewish people (loosely defined and used) have the ability to become full Israeli citizens as a process of ‘homecoming.’ There are a few purposes to the law: it provides a path to citizenship (necessary in any nation-state), it also purportedly solves fears of anti-semitism through the creation of a safe state and ends the diaspora/search for the land of Israel.

While problems exist on most levels of the its conception and implementation most problematic in my understanding is the relationship between expanding definition of those qualified to make the return and the inability of a Palestinian return. Through expanding who could return well beyond its original definition fromJew to child, spouse, grandchild et cetera there is initiated an infinite expansion that does not allow for a solution to the problem of Palestinian exile.

Part of the inability to solve the Palestinian return is thus placed not on the Israel’s own actions and policy, but on the potential citizens around the world. The placeholders of citizenship that exist for each of the 8 million non-Israelijews makes it impossible to deal with the actual people seeking to settle on that ground. The law of return makes it possible to foreclose the possibility of one person to obtain citizenship in order for another to have said citizenship in potentiality.

Such placeholder citizenship, as stated previously, places accountability on the ‘Jew’ who has no desire to ‘return,’ who has no intention to ‘return.’ However, there is no means of abandoning this placeholder granted by the census bureau. If there is a way to claim such a law of return, there needs to be an ability to deny, to revoke the so called ‘birthright.’