At this point, any gamer or gaming enthusiast is now tired of hearing about the ‘controversy’ surrounding The Last of Us Part II. However, a number of articles insisted that the game was ‘banned in the Middle East’. This started a vicious discussion across a number of Discord servers amongst friends and colleagues alike, regarding the western perspective of the ‘all-encompassing’ view of the Middle East and its video game market and industry.

For video game companies, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) has been unquestionably an afterthought; at best, translations in the pluricentric lingua franca of the region, Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), comes as an add-on to European localisation efforts. Thus, English or French versions of games are shipped into MENA countries, and sometimes, if they contravene local beliefs or culture, they are not, and never receive an official release.

The reason why video game translation and localisation in the MENA region is difficult does not have a simple response; instead it’s an incredibly complicated issue that delves into linguistic barriers, cultural issues and the gross oversimplification of a geographic area that spans multiple continents and over 400 million people.

In the greater MENA region there are 19 countries, and not a single one of them has an official rating board such as the ESRB, MPAA or PEGI. Furthermore, local distributors tend to be incredibly cautious when it comes to films or games that provoke concern, and thus they self-regulate in fear of governmental interventions.

This however does not affect most gamers in the MENA region, anyone who wishes to buy a game that is not being distributed through official channels can do so easily. Even in countries like Saudi Arabia, well-known for its draconian laws, little attention is paid to imported, streamed, or downloaded content, and the piracy market is massive. To put it in simpler terms, people play the games they want to play and watch content they like to watch.

Arabic fan-made translation of The Last of Us. — Arabic fan-made translation of *The Last of Us.*

The aforementioned The Last of Us Part II was indeed not available on the PSN store of Saudi Arabia or the UAE, but somehow its memorabilia and material saturated Amazon UAE. Yet contrary to the single-market and the mythical Middle Eastern encompassing governing authority, it was downloaded on thousands of PS4s on release day across the entire region (and as of today, it sold over 4 million copies worldwide, enshrining it as the fastest selling PS4 title of all time). Its posters were placed on a number of Amman’s video game stores, and Facebook gaming groups in the region have been flooded by guides, tips and user reviews.

Yes, we’re still traumatised, thanks for asking!

The game, like its predecessor, was a success in sales and buzz, and Ellie’s sexual identity, which every true fan knows since the first game’s Left Behind DLC in 2014, was never really an issue, despite never receiving an official Arabic language translation. A group of fans on Twitter translated the game and modded its interface, subtitles and most text into MSA as a symbol of their admiration to what many believe to be the best video game of the last decade. You can play it too assuming you have a modded PlayStation as neither Sony nor Naughty Dog accepted the fan-made translation. Whilst scrolling through hundreds of articles in Arabic over the controversial sequel, a single page from SaudiGamer.com stood out, its author felt it was necessary to complain about the LGBT concepts of the game, using colourful language as well. This was significantly less than the hundreds of articles, YouTube videos and blog entries in the English language that cried bloody murder upon realising the LGBT core of the protagonist’s identity.

Gamers in the MENA region mostly play games in English or French (being the two most spoken foreign languages in the area) with very few exceptions; FIFA games are translated into MSA and feature local teams and leagues, in addition to well-known commentators from the region such as Fares Awad and Raouf Khlaif who speak using their own dialects, albeit toned down and mixed with MSA to please the masses.

Another silver-lining in Arabic translation efforts occurring now is Ubisoft Abu Dhabi (whose website is not available in Arabic for some reason), which increased the number of Ubisoft’s titles available in MSA, and at a higher rate than other companies in the industry. This however comes at an interesting cost and an upsetting compromise.

From a technical perspective, user interface (UI) for most video games suffers due to the Arabic language right-to-left nature, which renders most UIs incapable of adhering to the language’s written format. Control, a beautiful Bauhaus nightmare had punctuation in all the wrong places and awkward and often unreadable line-breaks in text, on top of the misaligned major spelling mistakes (Arabic is hard, we get it), turning the experience into an actual nightmare to nerd linguists.

The Arabic version of Far Cry 5 did not change its UI to accustom the Arabic language. Keep in mind that Arabic readers read Right-to-Left. — The Arabic version of *Far Cry 5* did not change its UI to accustom the Arabic language.
Keep in mind that Arabic readers read Right-to-Left.

Pokémon Red released over 25 years ago has more English than the average Western localiser is comfortable with.

Furthermore, adult gamers from the MENA region suggested that upon trying to play a game in Arabic, they found that navigating the UI, menus and even saving the game proved to be a difficult experience, considering how the format that they’ve been used to growing up has been inverted, or changed drastically with bizarre translations. Personally, playing Resident Evil VII: Biohazard in Arabic was scarier than the game itself, the American Southern Gothic themes of personality cults, bioweapons and the dysfunctional family from hell was made laughable by overtranslated technical jargon and mistranslations of Cajun cultural and religious themes. Sometimes you don’t have to translate everything and there’s no shame in looking up the exact meaning of unfamiliar terms- take note localisers.

From an ethical perspective, many locals and residents alike notice that western self-imposed censorship on exported video games to the MENA region suffer from eradication of all references to sexuality, alcohol consumption and foul-language (but gratuitous violence seems to be generally fine- we’re looking at you Assassin’s Creed).

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, considered by many as one of the best games ever made, received a beautifully translated version of the game and the UI seems to be perfectly preserved, a rarity even in 2020. Yet those with the Arabic language version did not witness the sexually driven character development of Geralt of Rivia, and as far as they know, there was virtually no nudity whatsoever as all these scenes were edited out (and crashed boats were censored for some reason). Thus, many, if not most, gamers in the region chose to play the English version to experience the story as intended, defeating the whole purpose of the translation.

This Harry Potter character speaks in a feminine way in the Japanese version. — This *Harry Potter* character speaks in a feminine way in the Japanese version.

The major issues that seem to be working against translation and localisation efforts of Arabic in video games and media could be summarised into the following:

Mistranslation,
overtranslation,
over-trusting the translators.

Starting with mistranslations, Arabic (especially MSA which is the choice of written translations) has genders and numbers incorporated into nouns, verbs and adjectives. Then there’s the general tone of formality and conjugations that denote the speaker’s gender, social role and status. If the translator is not heavily involved in the process or knows very little about the project, there’s a very high chance that you’ll receive a product in which characters misgender each other and have an issue with understanding basic mathematics and perceptions of their surroundings. Most video game translators will tell you that Excel spreadsheets are the only item they receive when they are asked to translate a game, try translating a film into your native language with nothing but general text with no context.

Mario Odyssey, the quintessential Japanese Nintendo game is riddled with English text in the Japanese release.

In terms of overtranslation, which is seen a lot in Western games translated into Japanese (and there’s a whole lot more of that than Arabic), everything seems to be translated regardless of the historical context of using English. This is perfectly accepted from a linguistics point of view or when a book is being translated, but when ‘Press Start‘ gets translated into the target language, it loses a significant chunk of its allure and the overall feel associated with games. Imagine if the neon-filled streets of Hong Kong found in numerous video games were translated upon playing the English versions of Street Fighter, Tekken or Sleeping Dogs. Some may disagree with the following statement but even some of the settings and options in video games simply do not work when it comes to other languages besides English.

The original Japanese version of most Final Fantasy games uses the Active vs. Wait commands familiar to English-speaking players. — The original Japanese version of most *Final Fantasy* games uses the Active vs. Wait commands familiar to English-speaking players.

In most Japanese video games, Japan being a major epicentre of video game culture post the 1980s, players don’t adjust the game’s settings by clicking on the proper Japanese word for ‘choices’, 選択肢 [Sentakushi], they instead select the suspiciously English-sounding オプション [Opushon]. Additionally, in most Japanese RPGs, think any of the Final Fantasy games, a large number of options in the game don’t receive any translations whatsoever and continue to be in English in their native Japanese release. Speaking of which, Final Fantasy in Japan is not released as its literal translation 最終の夢 [saishū no yume] but instead asファイナルファンタジー [Fainarufantajī]. Yet when Western games get translated into Japanese literally everything gets translated. This issue is exactly what’s plaguing the few existing major Arabic language localisations of games. A generation that grew up pressing ‘Save‘ and ‘Load‘ now has to deal with ‘memorise‘ or حفظ [Ḫifẓ], and ‘Cargo loading‘ تحميل [Taḥmil]. This is linguistically sound, but it doesn’t fit the ear right for many MENA gamers, especially those who graduated from a generation of games that did not cater to their written language.

Take the following ad for example, the very Jordanian and very popular Escape the Room franchise, despite that the ad is in Jordanian Levantine dialect of Arabic (which is notoriously liberal in incorporating English terms and sentences in day-to-day conversation), it does not change the name of the store, the rooms or the slogan. The average Jordanian customer is generally expected to understand at least enough English to get through this ad without a problem (and even visitors know that almost all the puzzles require an understanding of English to solve).

In this LIFE Magazine photo from the early 1950s Amman, the store sign reads Ideal Standard in English, with a transliteration of that using the Arabic alphabet. The British bathroom hardware supplier chose to not translate its name in 1950s Jordan … — In this LIFE Magazine photo from the early 1950s Amman, the store sign reads *Ideal Standard* in English, with a transliteration of that using the Arabic alphabet. The British bathroom hardware supplier chose to not translate its name in 1950s Jordan and expected its customers to know what it was and what it meant. The same cannot be said to most video game translators in 2020, despite the increase of English language usage in the last 70 years or so and its association with technology and entertainment.

“Out of respect for our readers, heterosexual, LGBT or otherwise, we’ve decided to omit the massive number of screenshots we’ve taken from our local Netflix translations (and instead sent a torrential number of emails to Netflix explaining the severity of the issue and the word usage). ”

— The Embassy of Language team

The last dilemma is the general over-trusting of Arabic language translators with the English language source. If you’ve used the Arabic subtitles on Netflix, you may have noticed that words such as ‘gay’ or ‘homosexual’ were translated using the most odd and often incredibly offensive terminology. What was perplexing is that the original speaker used neutral and respectful terms and didn’t use any derogatory terminology that the translators felt needed to be authentically translated. This becomes even more intriguing when actual offensive language is translated as ‘Darn you‘ (we guarantee our Arabic speaking audience just giggled, they know what’s up). Fortunately, we have not yet seen any evidence of this in video games; unfortunately, most major video games have not received an official translation to cater to our sample size of surveying this phenomena. Looking at how things are going now, it is not something we’ll have to deal with soon.

To put it bluntly, despite the massive amount of technological and social advancements in the last three decades, gamers in the MENA region continue to have a limited supply of games in Arabic because the industry continues to ignore a region with over 50% of its population under the age of 25, and a thirst for the latest in interactive entertainment. Granted a good percentage of Arab gamers can speak English and/or French, and some swear they learnt English from playing video games, but the lack of Arabic translations acts as gatekeeping to mostly English-speaking youth in the Arab World.

The reasons are plenty but the solutions, regardless of what they are going to be, should be implemented without patronising an entire region, should aim to develop more Arabic-friendly UIs, and should indeed approach to IT solutions of MENA linguistics with an open mind.

Embassy of Language aims to make a significant change in Arabic language content creation and believes that entertainment, whether it’s films or video games, should receive appropriate Arabic language translation and localisation.

Join the conversation on our social media platforms.