Responding to reviews written in a language you cannot read
A review appears on your store page in a language you do not read. The thumb is down. You paste it into a translation tool and get back something that is either mildly annoyed or furious — you genuinely cannot tell which. Meanwhile the review is sitting at the top of the page, being read by exactly the people you were hoping to sell to.
This situation gets more common the moment your game reaches anyone outside your own language, and most developers handle it badly the first few times: either by ignoring it entirely, or by firing back a machine-translated reply that lands far harsher than intended and stays visible forever.
This article is about the practical handling — reading the review accurately, deciding whether to reply at all, writing a reply that survives translation, and then using the whole pile of reviews as the market research it actually is.
First, read it properly
Machine translation is good enough to tell you what a review is about and unreliable at telling you how it was said. That distinction matters, because your reply is calibrated to tone. The specific things that survive translation badly are sarcasm, irony, jokes, understatement, slang, and negation buried in a long sentence — which is an unfortunate list, because it describes a lot of how people write reviews.
A few habits make the reading more reliable. Run the text through two different translation tools and compare: where they agree you are probably safe, and where they disagree wildly there is usually idiom or sarcasm you would have missed. Translate the result back into the original language and see whether it still says the same thing. And read past the text itself — the recorded playtime, whether the review was updated later, and whether the complaint is about a specific moment or about the whole game all tell you things the words do not.
Be especially careful with short reviews. A three-word review is where machine translation is least reliable, because there is no context to disambiguate, and it is also where a joke is most likely to look like an insult. If a short negative review does not make sense to you, it may well be a meme, a genre in-joke, or affectionate mockery rather than a complaint.
Whether to reply, and how
Not every review needs an answer. Developer replies are public, permanent, attached to the review for everyone who reads it, and easy to screenshot out of context, so the bar should be higher than it would be for a private message. A useful filter: reply when you have something the reader could not have known — a fix that shipped, an answer to a factual misunderstanding, a genuine thank you for a specific detail — and stay quiet when the only thing you want to say is that you disagree.
When you do reply, write for translation. Short sentences, one idea each, no idioms, no jokes that depend on wordplay, no sarcasm at all. Say the thing plainly. Text written this way translates far more accurately than natural conversational writing, which means the reader gets closer to what you meant.
It is also fine — and generally well received — to say openly that you are using a translation tool. It sets expectations for any stiffness in the phrasing and reads as effort rather than as carelessness.
--- Thanking a positive review --- Thank you for taking the time to write this. I am replying with the help of a translation tool, so apologies if it reads a little stiff. I am really glad that part of the game worked for you. --- Replying to a bug report --- Thank you for the report, and sorry for the trouble. Could you tell me roughly where in the game this happened? I am tracking it now and will post here once it is fixed. --- Replying to a complaint about the translation --- You are right, and thank you for saying it directly. The text in that section is not at the standard it should be. I am having it reviewed and will note it in the patch notes when the fix ships. --- When you cannot fix it --- Thank you for the honest review. This is a real limitation of the game rather than a bug, and I understand why it did not work for you. If the store's refund window is still open for you, taking it is completely reasonable.
One rule with no exceptions: never paste raw machine translation into a reply on an emotionally delicate review without having someone check it, or at least without translating it back yourself first. Politeness levels are exactly what machine translation handles worst, and a reply that reads as curt or condescending in the reader's language will do more damage than the original review did.
Telling a real problem from one bad day
A single angry review is a data point about one player. The same complaint appearing three times in one week, from people who do not know each other, is a data point about your game. Before reacting, look for the pattern — and look for it per language, not just in the aggregate, because problems that are specific to one localization only show up in one language's reviews and get diluted into invisibility when you read all reviews together.
Check the timing too. A cluster of negative reviews that starts on the day of a patch is usually about the patch. A cluster that starts when a video goes up is usually about the video and the audience it brought. A steady trickle of the same complaint since launch is the one that is actually about the game.
There is also the case where the reviews are not about your game at all — a coordinated wave triggered by something outside the game, a pricing change, or a controversy you got adjacent to. Replying individually in that situation rarely helps and usually feeds it. A single clear statement in the place where you normally communicate, and then patience, tends to work better.
Your reviews are the cheapest market research you have
Beyond individual replies, the review list as a whole is a dataset most developers never read as one. Reviews carry a language tag, and storefronts commonly default to showing shoppers reviews in the languages they have set. That has two consequences worth internalising.
The first is that a review written in one language is read mostly by people shopping in that language. A cluster of bad reviews in one language is therefore not a small dent in a global score — it is close to the whole visible verdict for that market, arriving in front of exactly the players you were trying to reach there.
The second is that the distribution itself is information. Reviews in a language you never translated into tell you that audience found you anyway, which is a much stronger demand signal than a wishlist number, because those people bought and played. And a sentiment gap between languages — solid reviews in one, noticeably worse in another, for the same build — points at something specific to that localization rather than at the game.
- Which languages your reviews are written in, including ones your game does not support
- Whether the score differs meaningfully between languages, and which language is the outlier
- Whether reviews in one language keep raising the same specific complaint
- Whether players in an unsupported language are asking for support, or complaining about the lack of it in reviews rather than in comments
When the complaint is about your translation
This deserves its own handling, because it is both the most common language-related complaint and the one developers most often answer badly. Two responses to avoid: defending the translation because you paid for it, and over-apologising in a way that invites the whole thread to pile on.
The useful reply asks for specifics and commits to something small and real. Ask which scene, which menu, or ideally for a screenshot — a player who is annoyed enough to write a review is often willing to point at the exact line. Then triage what comes back, because 'the translation is bad' covers at least three different problems: an actual mistranslation, a stylistic choice the player dislikes, and a technical fault such as text that got cut off or a placeholder showing through. The third kind is a bug in your build, not a translation problem, and you can fix it yourself today.
One thing to be honest with yourself about: if several unrelated players complain about the text in the same language, the problem is almost never the specific lines they cited. Those are the ones they happened to notice. A review pass over that language as a whole is the actual fix, and patching only the quoted lines while leaving everything around them untouched tends to produce a second wave of the same reviews a month later.
When you do fix it, say so where those players will see it — in the patch notes, in that language. A visible correction changes how the remaining complaints read, and players who wrote critical reviews sometimes update them when they see the fix land.