Talking to players who do not speak your language

Your game sells in countries you have never visited, to people whose language you do not speak. Then the messages start: a support question, a streamer asking for permission, a long review that the store shows you in a script you cannot read. You open it, decide you will deal with it properly later, and later never comes.

That delay is the actual problem, and it is far more damaging than any grammar mistake you were worried about making. A player who receives an awkward but prompt reply feels looked after. A player who receives nothing concludes that the developer does not care about people like them — and that conclusion tends to end up in a review, where everyone else in that language reads it.

The way out is not to become fluent. It is to stop treating each message as a writing task and start treating it as a routine: a small set of prepared replies, a disciplined way of using machine translation, and a short list of situations where you must not rely on it. Set up once, this takes a few minutes a week instead of an evening of dread.

What players are actually judging

Players almost never grade your grammar. What they read for is whether you understood the problem, whether you are going to do anything about it, and roughly when. A reply that gets those three things across in plain, slightly stiff sentences is a good reply, full stop. Native-sounding prose that dodges all three is a bad one.

The second thing they notice is speed. In a support context, a same-day acknowledgement with no solution outperforms a complete, considered answer four days later, because in the meantime the player has been sitting with an unanswered problem and a purchase they may regret.

The third is consistency. If your announcements go out in one language, your support answers in another, and half your store page in a third, the game reads as unmaintained even if all of it is technically correct. Deciding which languages you communicate in — and then actually holding that line — matters more than covering many badly.

Build a template library, not fluency

Almost all of your outbound messages fall into a small number of recurring situations. Write each of them once, carefully, with help if you can get it, then reuse them forever with the specifics swapped in. This is not laziness — it is how support teams at every scale work, and it means the version a player receives is the considered one rather than whatever you could manage at midnight.

The list below covers most of what a small game actually needs. Write them in whichever language your players and you have most in common, which for cross-border indie contact is usually English, and store them somewhere you can copy from on a phone.

• Acknowledging a bug report before you have a fix
• Telling someone a fix has shipped
• Replying to a positive review or comment
• Replying to a negative review that describes a real problem
• Thanking a streamer or video creator, and confirming they may monetise the video
• Thanking someone for reporting a translation error
• Pointing a refund or payment problem at the platform that actually handles it
• Declining a feature request without closing the conversation
• Answering a request for a language you do not yet support

Acknowledging a bug:
Thanks for the report, and sorry for the trouble. I can reproduce
this and I'm working on a fix. I'll reply here as soon as it ships.
If you can send a screenshot and your game version, that helps a lot.

Fix shipped:
This should be fixed in version 1.2.3, which is live now. Thanks
again for reporting it. Let me know if you still see the problem.

Replying to a negative review with a real problem:
Thank you for the detailed feedback - you're right about the save
issue, and it's my mistake. A fix is in the next update. I'd rather
know about this than not, so I appreciate you writing it up.

Thanking a video creator:
Thank you so much for covering the game - I really enjoyed watching.
You're very welcome to monetise the video, and to cover any future
updates. If you'd ever like a key for a friend, just let me know.

Refund or payment problem:
Sorry about that. Purchases and refunds are handled by the store,
not by me, so the fastest route is their support page - they can see
the transaction and I can't. If it turns out to be a bug in the game,
send me the details and I'll fix it.

A language you do not support yet:
Thank you for asking - I'd like to support your language, but I want
to do it properly rather than with an automatic translation, so I
can't promise a date yet. I'm keeping a list of requests, and it does
affect which language I do next.

Using machine translation without embarrassing yourself

Machine translation is genuinely good enough for routine player contact, provided you change how you write before you feed it anything. The failures almost always originate in the source text rather than the tool. Write short sentences, one idea each. Do not omit subjects. Avoid idioms, wordplay, sarcasm, and jokes — irony in particular tends to come out the other side as a plain statement, which is how a friendly message becomes an insult. Keep exclamation marks and emphasis modest, since intensity translates unevenly.

Then check it, cheaply: translate the output back into your own language with a different engine than the one you used going out. You are not checking for elegance, you are checking for reversals, dropped negations, and any sentence that now means something you did not say. Anything that survives a round trip intact is safe to send.

Two practical details save a lot of pain. Keep version numbers, file paths, key names, and proper nouns out of the translated segment — paste them back in afterwards, because engines love to helpfully alter them. And read the output for register: many engines default to a formality level that can sound either cold or oddly casual, and a single wrong-register sentence at the start of a support reply colours everything after it.

Where you must not rely on machine translation alone

There is a category of message where an error is not embarrassing but expensive, and every one of them shares a trait: the text creates an expectation, a commitment, or a legal effect. For these, get a human to check before sending, even if it costs you a day.

• Anything about money — refunds, pricing, sales, subscriptions, or what a purchase includes. A mistranslated condition reads as a promise.
• Apologies for data loss, lost progress, or account problems, where a clumsy phrasing reads as an admission of something you did not mean, or as indifference.
• Legal and policy text — terms, privacy notices, age ratings, licensing. These are not support messages and should not be handled like them.
• Anything involving safety, health warnings, or content advisories.
• Moderation decisions in your community — bans, warnings, rule changes. These are read adversarially by definition, and machine-translated firmness reliably reads as contempt.
• Public statements during a crisis or a controversy, when your text will be quoted, screenshotted, and re-translated by other people.

Making it sustainable

Once your templates exist, put them where you actually work: your store's canned-response feature if it has one, a pinned note, a plain text file synced to your phone. The gap between a template you have and a template you can paste in ten seconds is the gap between a system that survives a busy launch week and one that quietly stops.

Publish a short FAQ in your main player languages and link it from everywhere — the store page, the community server, the game's own menu. A good FAQ is the highest-leverage translation you will ever pay for, because it answers the same questions repeatedly without you being awake, and it is short enough that professional translation of it is genuinely affordable.

Set an expectation you can meet rather than one that sounds impressive. A line saying you read everything and usually reply within a few days, in the languages you can handle, is honest and lets people stop wondering. Batch the replies into a fixed slot in your week instead of reacting to every notification, and be explicit about what you cannot cover — nobody resents a solo developer for not offering support in eleven languages, but they do resent being ignored without explanation.

Finally, know the handover point. When one language starts generating steady contact — reviews, community posts, support mail — that is the signal to get a speaker of it involved, whether that is a paid few hours a month or a trusted community moderator with a clear brief. Templates and machine translation are how you cover the long tail well. They are not how you serve a market that has decided to take your game seriously.