Making Games Funny Globally: The Art of Translating Humor

Humor is a crucial element in games, capturing players' attention and keeping them engaged. Whether your game features a humorous narrative or occasional witty dialogues, you want all players to enjoy the laughter and fun, regardless of their cultural background or native language. However, translating humor, especially between languages from different families, such as English and Korean, poses a significant challenge for game developers and localization teams. Understanding the mechanisms behind cross-cultural humor adaptation and working with creative native-speaking linguists can help fill your game with entertaining and faithful joke translations, delighting your global player community. To leverage humor in games, it's essential to recognize its various types, including irony, parody, and jokes. Irony involves amusing situations that turn out to be the opposite of what's expected, like a character afraid of ghosts who is actually a ghost himself. Parody mimics a person or situation for comedic effect, often used in games to mock video game tropes or other forms of media. Parody games can evolve into independent phenomena, becoming well-known on their own. When localizing a parody game, research the target locale to ensure the original source is well-known and has been localized into the target language. Jokes typically involve a brief story or observation with a punchline, triggering laughter. They can be observational, anecdotal, situational, or self-deprecating. While irony and parody focus on situational comedy, which is somewhat universally understandable, certain linguistic and cultural jokes are challenging to translate. Let's examine the different types of jokes and approaches to conveying them in another language. Linguistic humor relies on manipulated ambiguities, puns, rhyming sounds, and context, including phonological, morphological, and semantic types. Phonological jokes create ambiguity by playing with language sounds, stress, intonation, and pronunciation. Morphological humor plays on morphemes to evoke grins, and semantic humor relies on word ambiguities, like the verb form and state of nervousness of the word 'tense'. Cultural humor reflects the speaker's lifestyle and worldview, defined by their culture, making it the most difficult to translate. It employs national stereotypes and assumes familiarity with local news, sports, music, holidays, entertainment, politics, etc. To make a global audience laugh, a translator needs to be a native speaker of the target language, familiar with the source culture, and possess skills like clear writing, understanding of comedy, curiosity, and research skills. Word-for-word translation can work for certain types of humor, but sometimes the humorous effect lies deeper, requiring uncovering implied context, such as cultural references. If preserving cultural references is vital, using footnotes and comments can add context, though it may sacrifice humor and immersion. Transcreation allows for flexibility and creative tweaking of jokes for the target language, and replacing a joke with one that serves the same purpose in the target culture can also be effective. Finally, unless humor is essential to the main plot, omitting it might be the best decision, as forcing humor can have the opposite effect. As a developer, you can help translators by identifying the degree of flexibility regarding humor, providing context, and offering character profiles. Always remember that what's funny and harmless for some may be embarrassing or offensive for others, so localization testing is crucial to ensure your game evokes excitement without misinterpretation. Games provide the perfect environment to create comedy in a virtual setting, and humor translation, though challenging, is an exciting and creative process that shows you care about your global audience.