Staging and translating video game players’ language on screen: Ready Player One - Archive ouverte HAL Accéder directement au contenu
Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2023

Staging and translating video game players’ language on screen: Ready Player One

Alice Ray

Résumé

A new space opened up in which our identities are constructed, rearranged and manipulated: the cyberspace. Video games are also part of this new digital space and from the diversification and prevalence of online multiplayer modes a new language is born that participates in the elaboration of a “gamer identity” (Ensslin, 2012). For decades now, literature and cinema have explored cyberspace, whether to stage its possibilities, to highlight its promises or to imagine its consequences (Boz, 2021). Ready Player One by Steven Spielberg (2018), based on Ernest Cline’s novel (2011), investigates cyberspace in a dystopian world. Through that exploration and the characters’ relationship with cyberspace, Spielberg doesn’t just offer a visual representation, but he also uses the video game players’ language to establish the gamer identity of the protagonists, even though it is used sparingly for a broader audience. Using real samples of gamer-speak to create a coherent futuristic world in which cyberspace becomes a utopian escape door for most people entails a challenge for translators. Indeed, as gamer-speak is both a sociolect (as defining a community) and a technolect (as a specialised language, necessary to perform an activity related to a specific field), it is quite culturally and linguistically anchored in the players’ language. Through a comparative analysis, the paper focuses on studying the way gamer-speak is staged in the film and how it was handled in the French dubbing to create a similar world and introduce the language of the players to the audience.

Domaines

Linguistique
Fichier non déposé

Dates et versions

hal-04470669 , version 1 (21-02-2024)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : hal-04470669 , version 1

Citer

Alice Ray. Staging and translating video game players’ language on screen: Ready Player One. FAITES VOS JEUX. Gioco e spazio nei testi e dei testi, Università di Udine; Studi Linguistici e Letterari, Mar 2023, Udine, Italy. ⟨hal-04470669⟩
31 Consultations
0 Téléchargements

Partager

Gmail Facebook X LinkedIn More