Alice in Localizationland: An English-French Translation and Transmedia Study of Disney Characters' Speech in Films and Video Games.

The Disney studio has been known worldwide for its animated works for decades. In the mid-1990s, the studio adopted a transmedia approach to present its products to a diverse audience and has been an integral part of the video game landscape since 1981 (Madej and Lee 2020: 2). At the same time, the video game localisation sector is booming and studios are using it to maximise their return on investment (Mangiron, 2018: 123). It was in these conditions that the Gameloft studio released the game Disney Dreamlight Valley (Gameloft 2023), which was localised in several languages, including French.
This localisation into French is the subject of our communication, which is a transmedia and translation analysis (EN-FR) of Disney Dreamlight Valley (Gameloft, 2023) and the films The Lion King (1994), Frozen (2013) and Moana (2016). The aim of this qualitative and quantitative research is twofold. The first is to analyse the discourse of three character duos (Nala-Scar; Anna-Kristoff; Moana-Maui) in the films and to determine whether certain characteristics are incorporated into the video game. The second aims to highlight localisation strategies to see if the characters' style and references have indeed been rendered.
From a methodological point of view, we did not analyse the subtitles, but the audio versions of the films, which we analysed according to a series of criteria partially based on Lakoff (1975). We took several parameters into account: the presence of polite or insulting language, intensification, modality, types of adjective (Dixon, 1982), type-token ratios, sentence type and the presence of an imperative. I also analysed the references to films that were present in the game.
This study revealed that the speech of the characters in the game did not mirror the style of the characters in the film and tended towards homogeneity in that all the characters used more intensifiers and modal markers. However, the video games did try to incorporate elements specific to the films. These references have often not been translated appropriately, i.e. using the film's dubbing, and show a certain literalness on some occasions, suggesting a potential post-editing phenomenon. Because of these untranslated references to the original works, French-speaking gamers may not be able to fully enjoy the videogame experience, which directly raises the question of accessibility.
References :
ALLERS, Roger, Minkoff, Rob (1994): The Lion King. Walt Disney Pictures.
BUCK, Chris and LEE, Jennifer (2013): Frozen. Walt Disney Animation Studios.
CLEMENTS, Jon and MUSKER, John (2016): Moana. Walt Disney Animation Studios.
DIXON, Malcolm Ward (1982): Where have all the adjectives gone? And other essays in semantics and syntax. Berlin/New York/Amsterdam: Mouton Publishers.
GAMELOFT (2023): Disney Dreamlight Valley. (Version: PC) [Video Game]. Montreal: Gameloft Montreal Studio.
MADEJ, Krystina and NEWTON, Lee (2020): Disney Stories: Getting to Digital. Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland AG.
MANGIRON, Carme (2018): Game on! Burning issues in game localisation. Journal of Audiovisual Translation. 1(1):122-138.
LAKOFF, Robin (1975/2004): Language and Woman’s Place. New York: Harper and Row.