Bilingual features in a video game – Sleeping Dogs (by Michelle Chan)

My brother likes to play open world video games like Grand Theft Auto (GTA). In an open world video game you can walk around or drive freely in a virtual world, and there will be missions in which you sometimes need to fight or shoot people. Sometimes I also like to watch my brother playing video games. A year or two ago, he had played an open world video game called “Sleeping Dogs”. It is a game developed by a game company in USA and it is about Hong Kong triad societies. In the game you can see many Hong Kong streets, landmarks and public transports. But the virtual world is just a mini version of the real Hong Kong, and I think it looks more like a China Town in Western countries. The main point is that there are many Chinese words on the road signs (which reflects the real Hong Kong, of course), and the characters occasionally speak Cantonese (with English subtitles). The characters are mainly dubbed by American Chinese. Please watch the prologue of the game below.

(Caution: foul language involved)

For non-Chinese speakers, by hearing the Cantonese conversations, players can experience the foreign taste when playing the game. The authenticity can also be increased. This may be an example of “ethnosymbolism”. For Cantonese speakers, players will also enjoy it as this is the only few of the video games that use Hong Kong as the theme, let alone hearing Cantonese in the games.

In the game the characters have language mixing (English and Cantonese) in their conversations. However, the way the characters speak does not exactly reflect the way Hong Kong people speak. Our mother tongue is Cantonese. So we mainly speak Cantonese while sometimes using English phrases in our sentences. But the characters in the game are just the opposite. They speak fluent English (which was not the case for most Hong Kong people) while sometimes using Cantonese in their sentences. It sounds strange and unnatural for Hong Kong players. Also, starting from 11:37-54 of the video, the main character drove a minibus and there was a radio advertisement. The advertisement was in Cantonese yet was presented in a funny way. The speaker even had stammer! But after all this game is developed from USA, so it mainly targets on English speakers, and they can’t understand the “funny” Cantonese anyway. lol For Hong Kong players this is not a perfect game, but I think the English players should enjoy it.