Abstract
The interactive, playable language in digital games collaborates style and function to create a framework that sculpts player perception and agency. Machine translation tends to disrupt this balance horizontally, vertically, and contextually, thereby diminishing a line’s emotional and performative impact. Instead of preserving characters’ discursive stylization—which contributes to presence and ludic dynamism—machine translation typically replaces it entirely with paraphrases. Nevertheless, automated workflows can be constructively harnessed in the form of iterative systems to maintain formal equilibria, and, consequently, are likely to manifest the localized text’s affordances. In translation, however, formal constraints are not the ultimate goal; rather, the iterative text gains value for the game when stylization, translation, and play are disentangled from one another.
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