Right now, Galactic Civilizations III supports:

1. English
2. French
3. German
4. Russian

Because of the way we made Galactic Civilizations III, translation is very expensive.  There are a lot of words.  But nearly all of it is in the technology descriptions.

In this screenshot you see the short-description.

And this one shows the long description.

Translation costs by the word.  That long description has 38 words and each civilization has their own tech tree and each tech tree has hundreds of potential techs.  Thus, translating to the other languages we want to translate to costs tens of thousands of dollars.

Now, in the bigger scheme of things, this isn’t that much money.  But there are definitely languages where we won’t make that back.  So we have to put some thought into it.

So which languages should you translate to?  There’s a lot of data on that so I won’t bore you with the details.  But let’s look at what some other games translate to.

Here’s Stellaris:

1. English
2. French
3. German
4. Spanish
5. Polish
6. Portuguese
7. Russian

Here’s the new Master of Orion:

1. English
2. Russian
3. French
4. German
5. Czech
6. Japanese
7. Portuguese
8. Turkish
9. Polish
10. Korean

Here’s Rocket League:

1. English
2. French
3. Italian
4. German
5. Spanish
6. Dutch
7. Portuguese
8. Japanese
9. Korean
10. Russian
11. Turkish

And it would be insane not to include Civilization VI:

1. English
2. French
3. Italian
4. German
5. Spanish
6. Japanese
7. Korean
8. Polish
9. Portuguese
10. Russian
11. Chinese

Meanwhile, Ark? It supports 21 languages, all with full audio.

But none of that can hold a candle to Counterstrike: 25 languages.

Steam page translated

MOO: Steam page in other languages

GalCiv III: page translated

What to support and how much?

For one thing, the largely redundant long tech description is not something that really needs to be translated.  It could just use the normal description. This is what most games do (as in, nearly all games).  We just tend to be a lot wordier.  We’d continue to support the 4 languages we have but then add:

1. Italian
2. Spanish
3. Polish
4. Portuguese
5. Japanese
6. Korean
7. Chinese

We’d do the first 4 soon and the last 3 later since those would require some changes to our UI system to fit.

We live in a world of many languages and that’s a good thing.  Language is the key to culture and makes our world a richer place.  I just wish it was less expensive to translate it all.

Screenshots of the week:

by starmac45

by Radaney

by 41ndigo