Translating the game

Players who can't read our menus

Garden Defense is in the stores, and Remy spots a pattern: lots of downloads from Brazil, Germany and Japan, plus reviews like "Lindo, mas não entendo o menu" ("Lovely, but I don't understand the menu").

Translation turns words into another language. Localization goes further: it makes the whole game feel made for that place. Developers write it as l10n (an l, 10 more letters, an n). Internationalization, or i18n, is the code work that makes localization possible.

More than words

• DatesIn the US, 10/9/2026 means 9 October. In most of Europe it means 10 September. Use the local format, or spell the month out.
• NumbersEnglish writes 1,250.5 and German writes 1.250,5, with the comma and dot swapped. JavaScript's Intl.NumberFormat does it for us.
• MoneyPlayers trust prices in their own currency, at local price points like EUR 4.99. The currency lesson in Stage 6 shows how.
• Names and jokesA pun in English may mean nothing in Japanese. Good translators rename things and rewrite jokes so the feeling survives, not the exact words.
• Colours and gesturesA colour or hand sign that feels friendly in one country can feel sad or rude in another, so a local player checks the art too.

Localization covers everything a player reads, sees or hears.

Pick languages with data

Every language is work forever: each update, store page, support email and patch note needs it too. So we choose with data, not guesses.

Play Console and App Store Connect show installs by country, and Steam shows wishlists by country. Valve even suggests a cheap test: translate only the store page and screenshots into a language, then watch whether wishlists from those countries grow. If they do, we translate the game itself.

Every string out of the code

A string is a piece of text in code. If 'Play' is typed straight into menu.js, a translator would have to edit our code. So every player-facing string moves into a string file per language, like en.json and pt-BR.json, where each text has an ID such as "play".

The code only uses IDs: t('play') looks the text up in the current language. A missing ID falls back to English, never a blank. Numbers go in as placeholders, like "Wave {n}", so translators can move them where their grammar needs.

Room to grow, flip and draw

• Text growsTranslations are often longer, and short labels grow most. IBM guidance quoted by the W3C says English text of up to 10 characters can need 2 to 3 times the space. German builds long compound words that won't wrap, so buttons must stretch.
• Right to leftArabic and Hebrew are written right to left, so the whole layout mirrors. On the web, the W3C says to put dir="rtl" on the html tag, and to think "start" and "end", not "left" and "right".
• Fonts with the right lettersA pixel font with only A to Z shows empty boxes for ç, ü or Japanese. Japan's list of everyday kanji alone has 2,136 characters, so Chinese, Japanese and Korean fonts are big files we load only when needed.
• PluralsEnglish has two forms: 1 pest, 2 pests. The Unicode CLDR rules give Japanese one form, Polish four and Arabic six. JavaScript's Intl.PluralRules picks the right one.

Who translates, and how we test

Machine translation, including AI like Claude, makes a fast first draft. But it can't see the screen: is "Play" a button or a theatre show? So we add context notes (where the text appears, how much room it has), and a native speaker checks every language in the real game. Paid translators sign a contract, which a parent handles.

First, test with a pseudo-locale: a fake language of stretched, accented text. Android has two: en-XA (long text) and ar-XB (right to left). Plain English left over means a string stuck in the code.