Hi! Today I will write about localization.Let's start with something simple. Now, thanks to translators and other tools, localization has become a fairly simple thing. You might think that if developers just throw all the text into a translator, at least readable text will come out. But if you are not a native English speaker, then you know very well how bad the text from the translator sometimes is.The latest tools allow you to simplify the translation and this is very cool. But without proofreading the translation, you can screw up the translation quite a lot, and this is a problem. In fact, you can always hire a translator so that they can translate the text for your game, but nowadays many translators use AI or translators, and they give it to you without proofreading. Unfortunately, I know projects where this happened, and the developers had to redo the entire translation.So what to do? In fact, it's a game of roulette and if you are lucky, you will find good translators who can translate correctly. Otherwise ... well, no luck.But is localization necessary? I believe that localization is necessary. You may think that it is more work for the developer, or that it is expensive and there is no point in investing in it, but the more languages the project is translated into, the better the sales and overall rating will be. Of course, there are cases when you cannot afford to pay for a translator, but in this case, at least you need to do an auto-translation into English (unless of course you are a native speaker).Why is this important? First of all, English is a global language and the simplest possible language. And almost all AI translation is trained primarily in English. Even if you translate a game through AI into English, in most cases, proofreading will not be necessary. That is why it is important, it is quite easy to achieve and you will almost not lose quality in the translation.Of course, I am not saying that this translation will be 100% correct. Like any other language, it needs proofreading. But having even a not-so-correct translation is very important for your project.And what to do next? Well, prepare the game for the maximum number of translations! And for this, first of all, you need to understand how any translation in games works. Of course, this may vary from engine to engine, but I will describe how it works in Godot.First and foremost, you need to create a .cvs file in which you will record each line of text. This file is divided into columns and the first of the columns is keys, it is the main one and these keys are what you use to display the text:
As you can see, I have a key and its value . And in fact, you can use this CVS file for any localization by adding a new column with the correct language key in the first line (like en for English). By puting it into the engine, you will get localization files, and simply by adding them to the project settings you can have different languages in your game!
Of course, this changes the code writing a bit, as you need to set that you are looking for a key and not text, so you should always use your keys that are in the CVS file :
That's it. You have added a new localization and now your game will have several of them!But this only works for the developer, players will never be able to make their own translation for your game!That's why Godot has another cool feature - .PO files :
These are files that work as a single column of translation, and if the file name matches the localization key you can safely load it into the game during the first launch and add a new localization!I learned about this when I was studying how to create DLC and Mod support in my game. This feature will allow anyone who is interested in translating my game to translate it into the language they speak. In my opinion, this is enough to satisfy all players and honestly I think that any developers should do this. Even if you don't have money for translation, you can give players a way to do the translation themselves.For a Ukrainian like me, this is a very important topic, as the russians have been trying to destroy my language for more than 300 years. There were many bans on writing and speaking. Military and civilians who were captured by the russians are tortured just because of their language. And it warms my soul when I see how developers of even the smallest games add my language to the official release. And even without an official release, Ukrainians have many enthusiasts who translate games for free, I even translated three different R18 games on Steam for free. Therefore, localization must be there, and if your games have support for easily adding languages to the game, I am sure that many translations will appear for your game.