China’s first AAA game Black Myth: Wukong was voted the Game of the Year 2024 on the world’s largest platform for the digital distribution of PC games, Steam.Â
“Traditional Chinese culture, combined with the most advanced technologies, the best pictures and the best music, can create certain chemistry. We’ve proven that path could work,” said Feng Ji, CEO of Game Science, the game’s developer, in a previous interview.
The game, with its language originally in Chinese and story based on a household fantasy novel in China, would be a complete myth without the tremendous efforts Game Science and translators have put into its localization into other languages and cultures.
But as much as the company and its localization team strived to make the game understandable to foreign players, equal emphasis has been given to maintaining traditional Chinese cultural elements as faithfully as possible.
A small example would be the choice of “loong” over the accustomed option of “dragon” in translating the creature that carries an image and cultural significance very different from Western fantasies.
“The overall aim is to showcase the diverse cultures in Chinese games on the world stage through in-depth localization efforts and find resonance in cultural exchanges around the world,” Yu Yangming, a game localization architect who participated in the localization of Black Myth: Wukong, told CGTN in an interview while attending the annual conference of the Translators Association of China earlier this year.
With millions of players, China has become one of the largest gaming markets in the world. While China makes its own games, numerous games from other countries enter the country every year.
But CGTN searched on social media platforms and found Chinese players still struggling with awkward and often hilarious translation errors when playing games originally in other languages.
In this episode of Beyond ACG, CGTN invited game localization practitioners to have an in-depth discussion on the industry.Â
Executive producer: Zhang Jingwen
Producer: Yang Sha
Video editor: Chen Chen
Cameramen: Wang Hongjie, Li Xinfeng
Cover image designer: Liu Shaozhen
