Get ready for French (and the rest of the world!)

Every word a player can see belongs in a string table: dialogue, menus, tooltips, item names, achievements, error messages, store copy. Text that stays hard-coded in scripts or baked into images can't be translated without a programmer, and it is the text testers find last.

button.text = "Continue";
// and a PNG with "GAME OVER" painted on it

button.text = Loc.Get("UI_MAIN_CONTINUE");
// "GAME OVER" drawn as live text over the art

Quick test: switch your build to a fake language that wraps every string in brackets, like [Continue]. Anything without brackets on screen is still hard-coded. For a fuller check, use a pseudo-language that also adds accents and extra length, like [Ćöñţîñûé·····]. It catches hard-coded text, missing characters and truncation in one pass.

• Easy to forget: the Steam page and its short description, achievements, trailer captions, key art and screenshots with text on them, patch notes. They rarely sit in the string table, so list them with everything else.

Sentences assembled from pieces work in English and fall apart in French, where word order, articles and agreement change. Give the translator whole sentences with placeholders, and let them move the placeholders.

"You found " + count + " " + item + "!"
// French needs "Vous avez trouvé 3 pommes !"
// and the item name changes with the number

"You found {count} {item}!"
// with plural forms for {item}:
// one: "pomme"  other: "pommes"
// French "one" covers 0 and 1:
// 0 pomme · 1 pomme · 2 pommes

• Use named placeholders like {player} rather than %s, so the translator knows what will appear.
• Numbers: don't forget 0 and 1. Every {count}, {amount} or {gold} needs its plural forms, and French doesn't split them like English: 0 and 1 take the singular, and so does anything below 2. English writes 0 coins and 1.5 kilos; French writes 0 pièce and 1,5 kilo. A string tested only with 5 or 10 will look fine and break on 0 or 1.
• Support plural rules (ICU MessageFormat, or your engine's plural tables), because languages don't split singular and plural in the same place. English writes 0 apples; in French, 0 usually takes the singular, as in 0 pomme on a counter. Allow a separate message for zero too: in a sentence, Vous n'avez aucune pomme reads far better.
• List every possible value of a variable, or give examples. “{item}” could be a sword, an apple or a pair of boots, which are masculine, feminine and plural in French.
• Don't reuse one string in two places just because the English matches. “Free” on a price tag and “Free” on a prisoner are two different words in French.

As a rule of thumb, plan for French to run 15 to 30% longer than English. It varies with the text, and short UI labels can grow much more. Design for the longest language from the start rather than shrinking text later.

• Make text wrap as much as you can. Buttons, dialogue boxes, tooltips, item cards: let them grow onto a second line or scroll rather than cut the text. Fixed-width, single-line boxes are the most common cause of truncated French.
• When a limit is real (a button, a HUD slot, a store field), write it next to the string as a number of characters.
• Avoid auto-shrinking text as the only fix: it ends up unreadable on a Switch in handheld mode.
• French keyboards are AZERTY. Press WASD to move means ZQSD in France, and a hard-coded “Press Q” points to the wrong key. Show key prompts from the player's actual keyboard layout, and let the translator write {key_forward} rather than a letter.
• Voice-over and subtitles. Longer French subtitles have less time on screen, so allow two lines and enough display time. If you plan a French dub, the script is written to the length of each English line: send the timings with it.

French needs characters that many pixel fonts and custom fonts leave out. A missing glyph shows up as an empty box or a question mark in the middle of a word.

• Test your fonts with a sentence like « Où êtes-vous, cœur fidèle ? », which uses most of them.
• French as written in France puts a space before ? ! : ; and inside « guillemets ». If the engine breaks lines at that space, the punctuation ends up alone on the next line. A non-breaking space (U+00A0 or U+202F) fixes it, if your font and engine support it.
• Uppercase accents matter in French: ÉPÉE, not EPEE.
• Tell your translator what the game can display, so they don't use characters that will break.

Short strings are the hardest to translate because they are the most ambiguous. Is “Open” a button, a door that is already open, or a shop's opening hours? A one-line comment saves a round of questions and a round of fixes.

Screenshots beat descriptions. A folder of screenshots named by screen, or a short playthrough video, answers most questions before they are asked.

The translator often sees your text as a spreadsheet, out of order, one line at a time. The string ID is the first clue to where a line appears and who says it. In dialogue, the most useful ID names the speaker and the person spoken to.

dlg_0412   "You left without me."
dlg_0413   "We're ready."

CH2_MIRA_TO_JON_014     "You left without me."
CH2_MIRA_TO_PARTY_015   "We're ready."

Why it matters in French: “You left without me” has six possible translations, depending on who is spoken to: Tu es parti or Tu es partie to a friend, Vous êtes parti or Vous êtes partie to one person politely, Vous êtes partis or Vous êtes parties to a group. Without the addressee, the translator has to guess, and a wrong guess is a bug that only a French player will notice.

Big cast or group scenes? Add a speaker column and an addressee column next to the text if your IDs can't carry them. Group lines need to say “to the group”.

English hides a lot of grammar that French spells out. Decide these points before translation starts, so they stay consistent across the whole game.

In French, a translator doesn't just translate lines, they write each character's voice again: how formal they are, who they call tu or vous, their slang, their age, their humor. Without that information, everyone ends up sounding the same. A short bio sheet per main character changes everything.

Example bio sheetMira KadeMain companion · appears in every chapter

Gender, pronouns

Woman, she/her

Age

Late 20s

Role

Smuggler who joins the player in chapter 1, later the rebel leader

Personality

Sarcastic, loyal, impatient

How she speaks

Short sentences, street slang, swears when stressed, never polite with authority

Tu or vous

Tu with the player from the start, vous with the council until chapter 5

Name

No hidden meaning, keep as is

Sounds like

A younger Han Solo with less charm

Arc

Softens toward the player; her jokes get kinder in act 3

The documents that help, in order

1. Character bio sheetsOne per main character, like the one above. Secondary characters can share a single page.
2. GlossaryNames, places, factions, mechanics, and what stays in English.
3. Pitch and toneOne page: genre, audience, tone, references (“dry humor, think older Valve games”).
4. Style decisionsTu or vous, player gender, swearing level, translated title or not.
5. Story outlineThe plot in a page or two, spoilers included. Translators need the ending to translate the beginning.
6. World summaryA lore cheat sheet: history, places, the words people use in this world.
7. Screenshots, video or a buildTo see where the text lives.
8. Technical notesVariables, length limits, procedural rules, file format.
9. A contact for questionsSomeone who answers within a day or two during the project.

Short beats complete. Translators work against a deadline and a word count, so a 200-page game bible won't be read cover to cover. One page per character and a two-page world summary will be read, and reread. If you only have a long design document, point to the sections that matter for the text.

A translator follows your source text closely. If the English says “Health” in one menu, “HP” in another and “Life” in a tooltip, the translator has to guess whether these are three things or one, and every language inherits the mess. Inconsistency in the source looks small in English and sloppy in ten languages.

"Iron sword"  "Iron Sword"  "iron sword"
"Health"   "HP"   "Life"
"Press A to continue"
"Press A to continue."
"Equip"   "Wear"   "Use"   (same action)

"Iron Sword"   everywhere
"Health"   everywhere
"Press A to continue"   (prompts: no full stop)
"Equip"   for every piece of gear

Write down your rules

A few lines are enough. Decide them once, then stick to them across the whole game.

Why it matters in French: French doesn't use Title Case. Iron Sword becomes Épée en fer, with a single capital. So when your capitals jump around, the translator can't tell a proper name (the Old Growth, a faction) from a common word (old growth, a forest). Clear rules tell them which is which, and the French stays clean.

• One term per thing. Pick it, put it in the glossary, use it everywhere.
• One verb per action. If “Equip” equips, it equips everything.
• One punctuation rule per text type, kept from the first string to the last patch.
• Run a quick consistency pass before sending. Sorting your string file alphabetically shows duplicates and near-duplicates in seconds.

What gets translated, and what stays in English?

Names and text in the art need a decision before translation starts, not halfway through.

Write it down as a DNT list. A do-not-translate list of every name and term that stays in English, sent with the strings, saves dozens of questions and keeps the game consistent.

Loot names, random quests, generated insults, barks built from fragments: procedural text multiplies content cheaply in English and multiplies bugs in French. The generator follows English grammar, and French has more of it.

name = prefix + " " + noun + " " + suffix
// "Rusty" + "Sword" + "of Doom"
// FR: "Rouillé Épée du Destin"
//  wrong order, wrong gender

// template the translator can reorder
fr: "{noun} {adj} {suffix}"
// nouns carry their gender
-sword = épée  .gender = feminine
// "Épée rouillée du Destin"

• Few combinations? Write them out. Sixty full lines cost less than a generator and its bugs.
• Tag every fragment. The translator fills in the tags, the code picks the right form. Systems like Fluent ↗ or ICU select handle this.

  Fragment	Tags to provide	Example
  Noun	Gender: masculine or feminine	épée: feminine · bouclier: masculine
  Noun	Number: singular or plural	épée: singular · bottes: plural
  Noun	Starts with a vowel or a silent h	épée → l'épée · héros → le héros
  Adjective	Masculine singular	rouillé
  Adjective	Feminine singular	rouillée
  Adjective	Masculine plural	rouillés
  Adjective	Feminine plural	rouillées

• Let each language reorder. Put the assembly order in a translatable template instead of in the code.
• Store articles with nouns. l'épée, le bouclier, rather than a generic {article}.
• Let each language have its own tables. French may need more or fewer fragments than English.
• Explain the rules. Tell the translator how fragments combine, with real examples.
• Export samples for testing. A small tool that prints a few hundred random combinations, including the longest ones, lets testers check grammar and length without playing for hours.

Rule of thumb: a text generator is designed for several languages from day one. Fixing it after launch means recoding the system, not retranslating it.

You set the intent: keep it American, or make it feel local. Your translator spots which references land, which get lost, and adapts only those.

Translation is more than words. Food, holidays, school, sports, units and number formats all carry a culture. For each one, decide with your translator whether to keep it, because the setting is American and should feel that way, or adapt it, because the player should feel at home.

Keeping is often the right call: an American story should feel American, and French players know what Thanksgiving is. The skill is telling apart the references that carry meaning the player needs from the ones that are only flavor, and adapting only the first kind when they would get lost.

« Bonjour, mon ami ! Cette soupe
est magnifique ! »
// just a polite chef now

« Buongiorno, amico mio !
Cette soupe, elle est magnifica ! »
// the chef becomes Italian

Formats are not translation

"$1,299.99"   "03/04/2026"   "6:30 PM"

"1 299,99 €"  "03/04/2026" = 3 April  "18:30"
// use Intl / ICU formatters, not string tricks

French writes decimals with a comma, thousands with a space, the currency after the number, and days before months. Let the engine's locale formatting handle it, so translators never have to edit numbers by hand.

One French or several?

French is spoken in France, Québec, Belgium, Switzerland and across Africa, and the differences show up in games.

For most games, one international French that reads naturally everywhere is the right choice. If Québec is a key market, or your game is full of slang and everyday life, a dedicated Canadian French version can be worth it. Tell your translator who you're writing for.

Everything from the previous habits, sent together at the start: the documents listed in habit 8, plus three practical things.

And plan the timing

• Send the text once it is stable. A string freeze before translation starts avoids paying for lines that change the next week. Late changes are fine, as long as new and edited strings are marked.
• Translation isn't the last step. Keep time in the schedule for an in-game French check before release: truncated lines, missing context and leftover English only show up in the build.

Localization doesn't end at release. Patches, events and DLC add new strings, and players will report the lines that slipped through.

• Keep string IDs stable between versions, and mark new and changed strings so only those get sent.
• Keep the glossary and past translations, so new content uses the same words.
• Give French players a simple way to report text issues, like a Discord channel or a form, and log each report with its string ID.
• Budget a short in-game check (LQA) after each big update, not only before launch.