Springfall now speaks German and Russian

Springfall’s text used to live inside the interface. A button said “Build” because the code that made the button said so. That works until a second language exists, and then every line of text is a line somebody has to find.

This pass moved that text out. Roughly 21,000 rows of player-facing text now live in tables, around 214,000 English words in total, and the game looks each one up by key when it needs to draw it.

What a player sees

There is a language picker in Settings. On first launch the game chooses a starting language from what it can read: a saved choice first, then the Steam language, then the operating system’s. German and Russian are the first two to ship.

Menus, panels, item names and descriptions, crafting, faith, the court’s dialogue, the in-game wiki and the tutorial all read from the tables. Nothing about how the game plays changes. A colonist who is hungry is hungry in any language.

The translations are machine translated

Both languages were translated by machine, in batches, then run through an automated check for broken placeholders, mangled tags, lost line breaks and inconsistent terms. A glossary pins the names of the world, the factions and the jobs, so a faction is not called two different things on two different screens.

None of it has been read by a native speaker. The checks can prove a sentence is well formed. They cannot prove it reads well, and for a game where tone carries a lot of the setting, that matters. The tables are marked as machine translated in the files themselves, so nothing can be mistaken for reviewed work.

Small problems that turned out not to be small

Fonts. The game’s display font does not contain Cyrillic. Each language now has its own fallback font, and the language names in the picker are drawn in a font that can show every one of them, so a player who has landed in a language they cannot read can still find their way back.

Plurals. English has two forms of a noun: one and many. Russian has several, and which one you need depends on the number. Counted text such as “3 colonists” now picks the right form per language instead of assuming English rules.

Length. German words run long. A button label that fits in English can overflow in German, so this is the part still to be checked on screen across the whole interface.

What is not done

German and Russian have been tested through the translation tables and in a development build. They have not yet been looked at, panel by panel, in the finished interface, and overflow is the thing most likely to show up there.

A few kinds of text were left in English on purpose: identifiers, developer diagnostics, and anything that is written into save files, because changing a saved string would break older saves.

If you read German or Russian and would like to help review, the Discord is the place. Which language should come next?