This thesis has carried out a comparative analysis between the fan-translation by Scarlet Study, and the English official translation, by Plus Alpha Translations, of the Japanese video game duology The Great Ace Attorney: Chronicles developed by CAPCOM. The player acts as a Japanese defence attorney in 19th century Victorian England where he experiences various forms of xenophobia. The objective of this research was to detect what differences between the fan-translation and the official localisation there are regarding any racist, discriminatory and deprecatory terms relating to someone’s ethnicity and if any manipulation can be found in the translations. From the source text, 25 speech lines containing any offensive terms towards someone’s ethnicity, uttered by three different characters with racist beliefs, were collected. Then the parts corresponding to these 25 lines were collected in fan-and official translations. The speech lines were compared, and the kind of translation approach was analysed.

The results showed that both translations went through significant changes. However, the official translation had the most changes with many speech lines having different meanings, some even more offensive, compared to the source text. It is hard to conclude if any intentional manipulation was involved. It is, however, certain to say translation is the result of a translator’s interpretation of a text and therefore cannot escape some shifts or change whether it is intentional or not.