A descriptive and comparative study on the Turkish translations of the video game The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

Video games started to become a part of our lives with the emergence of arcade games in the 1970s and they have rapidly become widespread especially in the 2000s thanks to globalization and the fast growing game market. Game translation and localization played a big role in this spread. However, there are many games that do not have an official Turkish translation due to various reasons such as localization cost or political climate. Some games that do not have an official Turkish translation are occasionally translated into Turkish by their fans. In this study, both fan and official translations of the video game The Withcer 3: Wild Hunt are compared within the framework of video game translation strategies put forward by Alberto Fernández Costales in order to reveal the translation strategies used in them. The strategies are then interpreted within the framework of Hans J. Vermeer's Skopos theory in order to reveal the translations' aim. As a result of the analysis, it was determined that while both translations were produced with aims that could be regarded as similar, the translation strategies used tend to show a certain degree of variation.