This book focuses on the English lingua-franca uses in video-game interactions. The typographic and linguistic deviations from the standard norms are investigated, along with the cooperation strategies and status asymmetries of the participants in the online interactions, and the role of language in creating ideological representations.

This book explores the impact of a video game’s degree of realism or fictionality on its linguistic dimensions, investigating the challenges and strategies for translating realia and irrealia, the interface of the real world and the game world where culture-specificity manifests itself. The volume outlines the key elements in the translation of video games, such as textual non-linearity, multitextuality, and playability, and introduces the theoretical framework used to determine a game’s respective degree of realism or fictionality. Pettini applies an interdisciplinary approach drawing on video game research and Descriptive Translation Studies to the linguistic and translational analysis of in-game dialogs in English-Italian and English-Spanish language pairs from a corpus of three war video games. This approach allows for an in-depth look at the localization challenges posed by the varying degree of realism and fictionality across video games and the different strategies translators employ in response to these challenges. A final chapter offers a comparative analysis of the three games and subsequently avenues for further research on the role of culture-specificity in game localization. This book is key reading for students and scholars interested in game localization, audiovisual translation studies, and video game research.

There have been considerable recent demographic shifts in the use of English worldwide. English is now undoubtedly (and particularly) an international lingua franca, a lingua mundi. The sociolinguistic reality of English language use worldwide, and its implications, continue to be hotly contested. This is one of the first books to provide a detailed and comprehensive account of recent empirical findings in the field of English as a lingua franca (ELF). Cogo and Dewey analyze and interpret their own large corpus of naturally occurring spoken interactions and focus on identifying innovative developments in the pragmatics and lexicogrammar of speakers engaged in ELF talk. Cogo and Dewey's work makes a substantial contribution to the emerging field of empirical ELF studies. As well as this practical focus, this book looks at both pragmatic and lexicogrammatical issues and highlights their interrelationship. In showcasing the underlying processes involved in the emergence of innovative patterns of language use, this book will be of great interest to advanced students and academics working in applied linguistics, ELF, sociolinguistics, and corpus linguistics.

This volume examines the role of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) in education in Europe. Following the implementation of the Bologna process, English has assumed a central role in European education offering institutions the opportunity to cater to the needs of an internationalized student body and increase their competitiveness. On the other hand, the increased use of ELF has become an issue of concern, often perceived as a threat to other languages, tilting the scale towards linguistic inequality and stressing the urgent need for the development of new language policies. Both aspects of ELF are at the center of discussion in the proposed volume, which consists of a variety of papers examining ELF in different parts of Europe (Eastern, Central and Western) and different levels of education. The volume makes a substantial contribution to the lively and controversial debate about what is recognized as a central topical concern of language education policy in Europe and beyond.

This wide-ranging collection brings together essays on a recent approach to translation known as transcreation. Together with new modes of translation, such as fansubbing, fandubbing, and crowdsourcing, transcreation has challenged the traditional structure of the translation market, the agency and ethics of the discipline, and encouraged new research in translation studies. A debate has emerged around the two concepts of translation and transcreation, mostly in terms of differences between the two practices and issues such as creativity, abusive translation and appropriation. Mainly applied to commercial translation, transcreation is now gaining momentum among translation scholars in broader areas of application, going beyond the early focus of promotional and advertising products where it was initially practised. In the specific context of this volume, transcreation is discussed in relation to a variety of textual and visual genres that range from poetry, prose, theatre, film and television to tourism and highly specialised legal texts.

This book explores how corpus linguistic techniques can be applied to close analysis of videogames as a text, particularly examining how language is used to construct representations of gender in fantasy videogames. The author demonstrates a wide array of techniques which can be used to both build corpora of videogames and to analyse them, revealing broad patterns of representation within the genre, while also zooming in to focus on diachronic changes in the representation of gender within a best-selling videogame series and a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG). The book examines gender as a social variable, making use of corpus linguistic methods to demonstrate how the language used to depict gender is complex but often repeated. This book combines fields including language and gender studies, new media studies, ludolinguistics, and corpus linguistics, and it will be of interest to scholars in these and related disciplines.

Video games are a major source of contact to English language and culture, and the need to develop critical video game competency is high. This text presents reasons for (and defines) video game literacy for the English as a foreign language classroom as well as empirical research which covers problems and potentials of game topics in the classroom. This book offers as a result of the theoretical and empirical research countless ideas for task and material design, teacher education, theoretical and conceptual development of video game literacy and impulses for future empirical research.