Videogames and minority languages

Abstract

The videogame industry has been booming worldwide for the past thirty years. Ranking better than music and cinema according to turnover, games are the first choice of consumers in the Spanish leisure industry. However, given the imbalance between domestic production and consumer demand, most of the titles available in Spain have to be localized by foreign publishers prior to marketing, to be linguistically and –where appropriate– culturally adapted to the demands of the domestic market. Localization costs become most of times an insurmountable barrier for minority languages. In the case of Galician, this results in the non-existence of a proper local market and creates an apparently unsolvable vicious circle for language standardization in this area. In this context and inspired by its Brazilian counterpart, the ScummGL project is created within the Master's Degree Program in Multimedia Translation in the University of Vigo to provide Galician versions of classic video games.