Choosing target languages: a framework, not a ranking

Search for which languages to localize a game into and you will find ranked lists. Ignore them. The right languages for your game depend on your own audience, your genre, and how much text you carry — none of which a generic ranking can know. What follows is a framework for answering the question yourself, not a substitute answer.

Start with evidence you already have

Before adding any language, look at where interest in your game is already coming from. Store page analytics usually break down traffic and wishlist adds by region. Community channels — forums, Discord, social mentions — tell you which languages your existing players are asking for, or which languages they are already using to talk about your game among themselves even without a translation.

This evidence is worth more than any general ranking because it reflects your actual game, not games in general. A puzzle game and a tactics RPG can have completely different audiences even in the same store, and their language priorities will differ accordingly.

Look at genre conventions, carefully

Certain genres have developed conventions around which languages players expect as a baseline — this varies by platform and audience and changes over time, so it is worth checking current listings in your genre rather than assuming a fixed list. Treat genre convention as one input, not a rule: it tells you what players in your genre are used to seeing, which affects their expectations, but it does not guarantee your specific game will find an audience in a language just because peers in your genre support it.

Text volume changes the math per language

Every language you add costs roughly in proportion to your word count, but the multiplier is not identical across languages. Some languages expand text length relative to English source (German and Finnish are commonly cited examples of longer average output), which affects UI space more than translation cost. Others compress it. The practical implication is that a language that looks cheap by common ranking wisdom can still strain a UI that was only tested against English-length strings — you need to test with your actual translated text, not assume.

CJK and Latin scripts are not interchangeable engineering problems

Adding a CJK language (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) is not just another translation — it changes font requirements, since a Latin font typically covers a few hundred glyphs while CJK coverage requires thousands, and the font file itself is correspondingly larger. Text encoding needs to be UTF-8 throughout your pipeline, including any legacy export or import step, or you will see mojibake rather than a translation error. Line-wrapping logic that assumes spaces between words breaks on CJK text, which wraps at character boundaries instead. None of this is a reason to avoid CJK languages — it is a reason to budget engineering time alongside translation time when you add one.

Update burden compounds per language

Every language you support is a recurring commitment, not a one-time cost. Each patch, event, and content drop needs translation into every supported language before it can ship without creating a mixed-language build. A framework that only looks at launch-day cost will underestimate the total cost of a language whose community expects frequent updates.

Putting the framework together

None of these factors alone tells you the right language list — they interact:

• Evidence (traffic, wishlists, community requests) tells you where demand already exists
• Genre convention tells you what players in your category expect as a baseline
• Text volume and expansion tell you the real cost per language, not the assumed cost
• Script (CJK vs Latin) tells you what engineering work has to happen before translation can even start
• Update cadence tells you whether you can sustain a language past launch