Journey to the West

From Journey to the West to the West: Evaluating Black Myth: Wukong's Exhibition on Ancient Chinese Culture for Cross-Cultural Communication

This paper examines how Black Myth: Wukong, a Chinese-developed action role-playing game inspired by the classical novel Journey to the West, mediates traditional Chinese cultural knowledge for international audiences through English localisation.

• The paper argues that global visibility of Black Myth: Wukong should not be mistaken for cultural comprehension, and frames the game's English localisation as a form of cultural mediation comparable to museum curation.
• Using the character Lingxuzi as a case study, the analysis finds that the English version drops the meaning of the Taoist honorific suffix 'zi' by transliterating only the sound of the name.
• The English localisation misidentifies Lingxuzi as following Buddhist ways, although the Chinese source text explicitly marks the figure as Taoist.