Stylistic Aspects and Readability of English–Indonesian Translation of Heart Event Dialogues in the Coral Island Video Game

This study investigates stylistic aspects and readability in the English–Indonesian translation of Theo's Heart Event dialogues in Coral Island. While previous studies on video game translation have primarily focused on translation strategies, localization practices, and quality assessment, limited attention has been given to the realization of stylistic aspects and their relationship with readability in translated game dialogues. A descriptive qualitative approach was employed, analyzing 287 dialogue utterances using Newmark's stylistic framework and Nababan et al.'s Translation Quality Assessment model, with readability data obtained through questionnaires completed by nine raters who are Indonesian native speakers aged 19-30 years old, have a good understanding of Indonesian writing, active gamers with preference given to those who have played or are familiar with Coral Island, come from the group of college students, employees, and English Linguistics lecturer. The findings reveal that informal expression, warm tone, and positive attitude are the dominant categories in both the source and target language, with most stylistic categories maintained in translation. The readability assessment shows that 90.14% of the translated dialogues achieved high readability, with issues primarily arising from awkward wording, idiomatic expressions, and rendering errors. Overall, the Indonesian translation successfully preserves stylistic aspects while maintaining a high level of readability, contributing to a natural and comprehensible reading experience for players.