Do typos affect the reception of localised games?
What is it about?
We conducted an experiment to find out if spelling errors impact gamers' enjoyment of gameplay, comprehension of the plot, quality estimations of the translation, their perception of the translator, or the effort it takes to understand what is read. The errors were artificially added by us into the Polish version by team Ikskoks of the originally English atmospheric 2D side-scroller game by the indie dev Jesse Makkonen (https://www.jessemakkonen.com/) and distributed among Polish philology students.
Why is it important?
Language versions of games or films are products of hard work on behalf of localisation teams. They have to make sure the target version is “equivalent” with the original, so that consumers around the globe can enjoy the piece “like” the original audience. Our assumption is that introducing elements which were not present in the original has the potential to change our reception of a given title. Intuitively, an example of that would be linguistic deficiencies, like spelling errors (e.g. “spelilng erorrs”). Thanks to Jesse Makkonen, who agreed to modifying his game with such errors and showcasing them to our subjects, the experiment helped us understand how much – or rather, “if at all” – this intuition matches reality.