Chinese video game amateur localisation communities. A more-than-human netnographical exploration

Up to the present time, the study of online environments via netnography has provided a comprehensive understanding of the activities taking place in a plethora of virtual communities. Previous studies have examined both communities of interest, composed of “participants who interact extensively around specific topics of interest” (Armstrong & Hagel, 2000, p. 86), and communities of practice, groups that share a passion around specific activities (Lave & Wenger, 1997). However, communities of interest and practice focused on the amateur localisation of video games have not received enough scholarly attention. The present article focuses on one Chinese PC video game amateur localisation community and explores such an online network of modders and non-professional localisers that strive to disseminate Chinese interactive multimedia creations through several localisation-enabling technologies embedded in online collaborative platforms. This piece of research resorts to a novel strain of netnography (Kozinets, 2010) that goes beyond the human. More-than-human ethnography refers to the inclusion of natural elements, sentient beings, technology and different factors in the study of human activities (Lien & Palsson, 2019), a perspective that has been recently applied to the assessment of human and A.I. labour and human and non-human networked sociality, showing considerable reconnaissance potential. Amateur localisation processes can only be kick-started by team members with romhacking or modding abilities, after accessing the code and modifying the files. In this regard, the whole online collaborative localisation process is made possible through technology, and takes place through the multi-spatial and multi-temporal collaboration happening between several actors. In this article, the community structures, human-human collaboration and human-non-human interrelations will be explored. Moreover, the process of amateur localisation that volunteers perform through a multifarious array of hardware and software will be probed from an insider’s perspective, including the roles that collaboration and motivation play in these processes. Finally, the benefits of harnessing the power of more-than-human netnography for the study of technology-driven communities of practice will be weighed, hinting towards the invaluable expansion that such social tool can offer to Translation Studies for a comprehensive understanding of online collaborative localisation processes. This paper argues that technology-enabled tools, such as bots, avatars and code, are playing a ground-breaking and disrupting role in amateur localisers’ digital communications, giving birth to what can be considered as a new kind of “technologically mediated sociality” (Kozinets et al., 2018, p. 240) in non-professional translation and localisation processes.