The Mukokuseki Strategy and the Application of Pivot Translation in the Localization of Japanese Games

This article investigates the impact of using pivot language on the quality of game localization via a case study on the Japanese game Dark Souls 3. It first discusses the indirectness of the source text and the complexity of the target text in game localization by highlighting the “born translated” nature of the game narrative design. It then explicates the intricacy of having game audio voiced over in English only and including both direct and indirect translations in the localization workflow. It demonstrates the complication in evaluating localization quality from players’ perspectives and suggests that using English as a pivot language has certain advantages in ensuring multimodal cohesiveness in game localization. The rationale behind the localization approach is then explored through the lens of the mukokuseki strategy, which suggests that the application of pivot translation is driven by market globalization and, ultimately, the pursuit of economic gain

Modeling and Predicting Popularity Dynamics via Reinforced Poisson Processes

An ability to predict the popularity dynamics of individual items within a complex evolving system has important implications in an array of areas. Here we propose a generative probabilistic framework using a reinforced Poisson process to model explicitly the process through which individual items gain their popularity. This model distinguishes itself from existing models via its capability of modeling the arrival process of popularity and its remarkable power at predicting the popularity of individual items. It possesses the flexibility of applying Bayesian treatment to further improve the predictive power using a conjugate prior. Extensive experiments on a longitudinal citation dataset demonstrate that this model consistently outperforms existing popularity prediction methods.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figure; 3 table

Evaluation of Time-Varying Availability in Multi-Echelon Inventory System with Combat Damage

10.1109/COASE.2005.1506773Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE Conference on Automation Science and Engineering, IEEE-CASE 20052005226-23

Experimental investigation of fatigue crack growth behavior of GH2036 under combined high and low cycle fatigue

International audienceFatigue crack growth rates have been experimentally determined for the superalloy GH2036 (in Chinese series) at an elevated temperature of 550°C under pure low cycle fatigue (LCF) and combined high and low cycle fatigue (CCF) loading conditions by establishing a CCF test rig and using corner-notched specimens. These studies reveal decelerated crack growth rates under CCF loading compared to pure LCF loading, and crack propagation accelerates as the dwell time prolongs. Then the mechanism of fatigue crack growth at different loadings has been discussed by using scanning electron microscope (SEM) analyses of the fracture surface

Optimal VM placement in data centres with architectural and resource constraints

Recent advance in virtualisation technology enables service provisioning in a flexible way by consolidating several virtual machines (VMs) into a single physical machine (PM). The inter-VM communications are inevitable when a group of VMs in a data centre provide services in a collaborative manner. With the increasing demands of such intra-data-centre traffics, it becomes essential to study the VM-to-PM placement such that the aggregated communication cost within a data centre is minimised. Such optimisation problem is proved NP-hard and formulated as an integer programming with quadratic constraints in this paper. Different from existing work, our formulation takes into consideration of data-centre architecture, inter-VM traffic pattern, and resource capacity of PMs. Furthermore, a heuristic algorithm is proposed and its high efficiency is extensively validated