Importing translations

Games and internationalization

The world is full of different markets and cultures and, to maximize profits™, nowadays games are released in several languages. To solve this, internationalized text must be supported in any modern game engine.

In regular desktop or mobile applications, internationalized text is usually located in resource files (or .po files for GNU stuff). Games, however, can use several orders of magnitude more text than applications, so they must support efficient methods for dealing with loads of multilingual text.

There are two approaches to generate multilingual language games and applications. Both are based on a key:value system. The first is to use one of the languages as the key (usually English), the second is to use a specific identifier. The first approach is probably easier for development if a game is released first in English, later in other languages, but a complete nightmare if working with many languages at the same time.

In general, games use the second approach and a unique ID is used for each string. This allows you to revise the text while it is being translated to other languages. The unique ID can be a number, a string, or a string with a number (it’s just a unique string anyway).

Note

If you need a more powerful file format, Godot also supports loading translations written in the gettext .po format. See Localization using gettext for details.

Translation format

To complete the picture and allow efficient support for translations, Godot has a special importer that can read CSV files. All spreadsheet editors (be it Libreoffice, Microsoft Office, Google Docs, etc.) can export to this format, so the only requirement is that the files have a special arrangement. The CSV files must be saved in UTF-8 encoding and be formatted as follows:

The “lang” tags must represent a language, which must be one of the valid locales supported by the engine. The “KEY” tags must be unique and represent a string universally (they are usually in uppercase, to differentiate from other strings). Here’s an example:

CSV importer

Godot will treat CSV files as translations by default. It will import them and generate one or more compressed translation resource files next to it.

Importing will also add the translation to the list of translations to load when the game runs, specified in project.godot (or the project settings). Godot allows loading and removing translations at runtime as well.