Players are asking you to translate your game. What to do next

It usually arrives as one line under a trailer, or as a message from an account you have never seen before. Please make an English version. Will you support Spanish? Any plans for Portuguese? Sometimes it is a whole paragraph of enthusiasm with a specific request at the end. Sometimes it is four words and nothing else.

The natural reaction is to read it as a compliment, feel good for a minute, and move on. That undersells it badly. Somebody in another country found your game, understood enough of it to want it, and then told you exactly what is stopping them from playing. Companies pay research agencies for weaker signals than that, and you got it for free from someone who is still waiting for a reply.

What follows is what to do in the days after that first message: what to write back before you have made any decision, how to tell whether the request is one person or a market, what the smallest useful response looks like, how to say no without losing anyone, and what to watch for when somebody offers to do the translation for you.

Reply before you have decided anything

The instinct is to wait until you have an answer. You do not know what a translation would cost, you have not counted your text, and you would rather say nothing than say the wrong thing. So the message sits there, a week passes, then a month, and the person who asked quietly concludes the game is abandoned.

A reply costs a minute and commits you to nothing. The only real mistake available to you here is promising a date. A cheerful 'yes, coming soon' that turns into eight months of silence does more damage than a plain 'not right now' — the first one creates an expectation you then break, and people remember broken expectations far longer than they remember a no.

A good reply does three things: it thanks the person, it states honestly where the game actually stands, and it asks one question that turns a comment into information. Which language exactly is worth asking, because the answer matters more than it sounds. Spanish for Spain and Spanish for Latin America are different jobs. Portuguese for Brazil and Portuguese for Portugal are different jobs. Chinese comes in simplified and traditional. So does the scope of what they want: menus and tutorial prompts, or the whole story?

--- When you have no plans yet ---
Thanks for playing, and thanks for asking. Right now the game is only available in <language>, and I don't have a translation scheduled yet. I am keeping a list of the languages people ask for, so this counts. Which language would you want, and did you find the game through a video or on the store?

--- When you are considering it ---
Thank you. A <language> version is something I want to do, but I can't promise a date yet — I need to work out how much text the game actually contains first. If you follow the game on its store page, any change to the supported languages shows up there.

--- When it is genuinely scheduled ---
Good news: <language> is coming in the next update. I'll post an announcement on the store page when it goes live. If you spot anything that reads badly once it's out, please tell me.

Work out how big the request really is

One message is a signal, not a market, and there are two ways to get this wrong. Ignoring it because it is only one person is the common one. Reorganising six months of work around it is the rarer but far more expensive one.

The cheap fix is to stop judging by feel and start keeping a list. A single note file with the date, the language requested, and where it came from takes a few seconds per entry, and after a month or two you have something better than an impression — you have a distribution.

Then go and read data you already have and probably have not looked at. If you sell on Steam, Steamworks breaks wishlists, traffic and sales down by country, and your review section tells you which languages people are writing in. Other storefronts expose similar country-level numbers. A language that keeps appearing in your inbox and also shows up as a bump in that data is a completely different proposition from a language that appears only in your inbox.

Weight independent sources more heavily than raw volume. Thirty comments that all arrived in the two days after one creator covered your game are one community, not thirty data points. Two requests a week arriving from unrelated places over two months is a much stronger signal even though the number is smaller. When you review your list, these are the things worth being able to answer:

• Which exact variant of the language is being asked for, not just the language family
• Whether people want the interface playable or the story readable — for some games those are the same request, for others they are months apart
• Whether the requests cluster right after a single video, or arrive steadily from unrelated places
• Whether that country also shows up in your wishlist, traffic and review data, not only in messages
• Whether players there can actually buy easily — availability, a sensible price in local currency, payment methods

If you decide to do it, ship the smallest version first

Adding a language to a game is usually called localization: translating the text, and then making the game able to store, display and switch between languages. It is several jobs rather than one, and — this is the part that gets missed — you do not have to finish all of them before anything is worth shipping.

Start with the store page. It is a few hundred words against the thousands or tens of thousands inside the game, and it is the surface that decides whether anyone in that language can evaluate your game at all. It is also close to reversible: if a page in a new language produces nothing over a couple of months, you have bought that answer for the price of a small translation.

The interface comes next — menus, options, tutorial prompts, error messages, achievement names. That is what makes the game playable rather than merely purchasable, and in most games it is a small fraction of the total word count. Narrative text comes last, because it is the largest and most expensive piece by a wide margin.

That order has one honest exception. If your game is a visual novel or a story-driven RPG, the story is the product, and interface-only support will disappoint exactly the people who asked. In that case be precise about how you label what you support, so that nobody buys expecting a translated story and finds translated menus instead.

The cost surprise is rarely the translation itself. It is discovering that your text is written directly into your code, your scenes and your images rather than sitting in files you can export and hand to somebody. If that is your situation, pulling the text out is the real project, and it is much better to learn that before you have quoted yourself a timeline in your head or promised one to a player.

When you do ship it, go back and tell the people who asked. They are the most likely first reviewers you will ever have in that language, and a genuine review written in the language you just added is worth more than the translation cost it took to earn it.

If you decide not to, say so out loud

No is a legitimate answer. Most games cannot support most languages, and a solo developer who chooses to finish the game instead of translating it is making a defensible call.

What is not defensible is silence, because silence gets read as abandonment, and because the same question will keep arriving forever until you answer it somewhere permanent. A short line on your store page, in a pinned post, or in a community FAQ answers everybody at once: which languages the game supports today, and whether more are planned.

Give the real reason in one sentence, do not over-apologise, and do not say never. If there is a condition that would change your mind — sales reaching a level that pays for it, finishing the current content roadmap, finding a partner — say what it is. A condition is honest, it is something the person asking can actually affect by buying and telling their friends, and it saves you from a promise you cannot keep.

--- A clear no that does not close the door ---
Thanks for asking, and sorry for the blunt answer: I can't add <language> right now. The game has a lot of text and I'm working on it alone, so a translation would take months I don't currently have. If sales get to the point where they'd pay for it, adding languages is the first thing I'd spend that on — I'll post on the store page if that changes. In the meantime, the game does have <what you can honestly offer: full controller support, minimal text in gameplay, community subtitles, and so on>.

When someone offers to translate it for you

The most common follow-up to a translation request is an offer to do it. Sometimes it comes from a fan who loves the game, sometimes from a student who wants the credit on a portfolio, sometimes from a professional pitching for paid work.

Volunteer translations can be excellent — some of the best-loved versions of small games exist because a player cared enough to make one. They also fail in a characteristic way: they stop halfway. Enthusiasm is not a schedule, and a language that is sixty per cent translated in a build you have already shipped is worse than a language you never claimed to support, because now the gaps are yours to explain.

If you take the offer, treat it as a small project rather than a favour, and settle a few things in writing — a chat message counts as writing. What exactly is being translated, in what file format, by roughly when, how they will be credited, and confirmation that you may use, edit and ship the result including in future updates. None of that is unfriendly. It is the part that stops a good relationship from turning into an argument six months later when you need to change one of their lines.

You will also have to solve the problem that you cannot read the result. Assume you need a second pair of eyes on at least a sample: a paid review of a few hundred lines by someone unconnected to the first translator is cheap next to shipping text you have no way to judge, and it tells you quickly whether the rest is safe.

Unsolicited pitches arriving by direct message are a separate category and deserve more caution than an offer from someone who has clearly been playing your game. Ask for previous work you can look up yourself, start with a small paid sample rather than the whole game, agree payment terms before any files move, and be careful with anyone who pressures you for a fast decision or wants a build before anything is agreed. Genuine translators will not mind a single one of those steps.