Themost popular gameson the Google Play Store are available in multiple languages. If you really want your game to grow, you can’t have dialogs and menu items in just one language. But if you’re a small developer, you might not be able to afford translation services, and unless you know multiple languages, your hands are pretty much tied. That’s exactly where Google’s latest developer tool comes in. Google has announced an addition to the Google Play Console that hooks into Google Translate, helping translate in-app text in your games into more languages, near instantaneously and free.
As sharedduring the Google for Games Developer Summit 2023, the Play Console will soon feature Machine Translation, which helps you translate text in games into eight languages. The technology will use Google Translate, so it’s basically the same as grabbing the strings in your games and manually translating them. This is less tedious, though, and has the potential to give you a fully-translated game within minutes. We all know how poor machine translation can sometimes be, so you’d probably still want someone who knows the language in question to have one last look. The tool also can’t translate things like voiced dialogs — that would be asking too much from it. Strings are still a good start and would let you expand your game’s scope to a lot more people.
We don’t know which languages exactly will be supported. Google mentions Simplified Chinese and Japanese as two of them. If you’re interested,a form to apply for early accessis now live.
Note that the machine-based service introduced here is different from theexisting translation serviceGoogle offers within the Play Console. The existing service is paid and it can take a few days until you have your results, as it’s a service that works with human translators.
It’s not the only announcement made by Google. The company also shared that it’s expandingGoogle Play Games for PC, which lets you play Android games on Windows PCs, to Europe and Japan. It’s also adding other titles, such as Garena Free Fire and Ludo King, which are hugely popular with smartphone users right now.
