Translate a game

Every translation in the catalog started exactly here: someone pointed Tranzio at a game and said "let's translate this." Translate a game is a guided wizard, so you're never staring at an empty screen wondering what's expected. It walks you through a handful of small steps, each one either automatic or a single decision, and at the end the game sits in your library with all its text extracted and ready to translate.

The walkthrough#

1. 1

   Open Translate a game and pick your game

   In the Main section of the sidebar, choose Translate a game. Tranzio shows the games it found on this computer, from Steam and Epic, as cards with their artwork. Click the one you want. If yours is not there, use the panel at the bottom to drag its folder in or browse for it.

   A card that is greyed out is a game Tranzio cannot translate yet, and the card says which engine it uses. During the open beta that means Unreal Engine 4 and 5 games can be added and the rest cannot, so they are shown rather than hidden: a game missing from the list reads as a fault, and this way you can see it is simply not supported yet.

   If the folder you pick is already one of your games, the wizard says so and offers to open it instead of setting it up again. Adding it twice would not give you a tidier library, it would give you a second copy with its own translations and its own adaptations, which is not something you can merge back together afterwards.

2. 2

   Check that it found the right game

   Tranzio opens the folder and works out which game is in it, rather than trusting the folder's name, which is often a codename or an abbreviation. It reads the Steam entry the folder belongs to, the game's own program file, and the project's settings, then looks the answer up in its catalog. The name, artwork, developer, release date and genres arrive with the match, so there is nothing to type.

   The game is then shown the way its own page shows it, with artwork, the description, trailers, screenshots and the languages it already ships in, so one look is enough to tell whether it found the right game.

   Almost always it is already right and you carry on. When it is not, search for the right game, or use Don't see it? Create a new game and carry on with just the name and the folder. The line above the match shows what was read: the engine, the size of the folder, and the program file it found.

3. 3

   Let the scan run

   Now Tranzio reads through the game's archives and pulls out everything translatable. This is the step where the engine matters: the scanner knows how Unreal games store their text and where to look. The log tells you what it found as it goes.

   Reading an Unreal game needs a couple of small command-line tools, and on a computer that has never had them the scan downloads them first. There is no separate step for it: the log shows each download filling, then the scan carries straight on. It only ever happens once. On macOS and Linux the tools are Windows programs and run through Wine, so if Wine is missing the log says so and points at the Tools page.

   live-scan.logscanning

   00:00enginesignature match: Unreal Engine 5

   00:01toolschecking the tools this scan needs

   00:01toolsRePak not installed, downloading it now

   00:01download[1/1] RePak

   00:08download[======================] 100%27.1 MB / 27.1 MB

   00:08downloadRePak · checking the download is intact

   00:09downloadRePak installed

   00:09toolsevery required tool is in place

   00:10scanwalking the game folder

   Under the bar the scan says how long it has been running, and how much longer it expects to be once it has moved enough to know. A big game can sit near the end for a while, reading inside its archives; if that happens the estimate gives way to the elapsed clock rather than promising a second that never arrives.

   A translation already installed in that folder is no longer in the way. A translated pak lives in the game's mod folder, and the scan skips that folder whole, so the game underneath is what gets read. The log says it found one and is ignoring it.

   Dubbed audio used to stop the scan, and no longer does. The scan sorts files by their name and where they sit, and never opens an audio file, so a dub was never going to be read as the game's original voice: what gets recorded is the clip's path, which is the same whether or not a translation is installed. Cutscene subtitles are read, and there the game's own copy is kept beside the translated one as original_… and is the one imported. You can scan a folder with a translation installed, and the log says what it stepped over.

   Text entries

   12,483

   Fonts

   9

   Audio

   2,841

   scan.logdone

   00:00scaninit · scanning Silksong

   00:02enginesignature match: Unreal Engine 5

   00:03cryptoreading archive footers

   00:06archives14 archives detected

   00:11text12,483 text entries (.locres)

   00:14fonts9 font files

   00:19audio2,841 audio files

   00:21scancomplete · manifest written

   When it finishes you get the inventory. These numbers are your project's size at a glance:

   Text strings

   12,483

   Voice lines

   2,841

   Size

   284MB

   Some games ship their archives encrypted, and nothing inside them can be read without that game's AES key. Tranzio spots this before scanning and finds the key itself in almost every case: it checks for one saved on this computer, then one another translator has shared, and then it reads the key out of the game's own program files. A game that decrypts its archives has to carry the key to do it, so that last step usually settles it in a second or two, needs no account and no connection, and cannot be out of date because it comes from the exact build you have.

   You are only asked to paste a key when all three come back empty, which mostly means the game ships its program files packed so the key is hidden inside. The log names each step as it runs, so you can see which one found it. Archives that stay locked are skipped rather than read as empty, and the log says so.

4. 4

   Choose your languages

   Set the language the game is written in (Tranzio guesses it from the files it found) and the language you're translating into. The target becomes your first adaptation's language; you can add more languages later as separate adaptations.

   Japanese

   Popular

   Select all

   JapaneseJAFrenchFRGermanDE

   Europe

   Select all

   PortuguesePTUkrainianUKGreekEL

   Caucasus & Central Asia

   Select all

   GeorgianKAArmenianHY

   Asia Pacific

   Select all

   KoreanKOVietnameseVI

   A language may be greyed out with a line through it. That means this particular game is not open to translations into it, usually because the publisher already ships one or has asked for it to be left alone. Hover it and the reason is there. It only ever applies to the one game, so every other game in your library is unaffected.

   If it happens to be the language Tranzio pre-filled for you, the pick is cleared and the step says so. Choose another one and you can carry on; the wizard will not move past this step without something to translate into.

   What you pick here decides what the next step brings in. A game that ships fourteen translation folders offers all fourteen, and taking one off this list takes its files off the Assets step too, so you are not importing Japanese in order to translate from English. Put the language back and its files come back with it.

   Voice works the same way, with one addition: clearing every voice language turns audio off altogether. The Audio list disappears from the Assets step and no clips are imported, which is what you want when you are translating text only. While any voice language is still selected, files that name no language at all (music, effects) are kept, because they are not duplicated per language and skipping them would lose them for good.

   Both lists start with everything the scan found already ticked, and they stay that way until you change something. That matters if you scan again: a scan can turn up a language the first pass missed, and it arrives ticked like the rest rather than sitting there waiting to be noticed. Once you tick or untick anything, the list is yours and Tranzio stops adding to it.

   One kind of voice language has to be worked out rather than read. An Unreal game keeps its own recordings at the plain content path and stacks translated copies on top, so only the copies say what language they are in. Tranzio reads the game's own configuration to name the rest, which is why a game can show you its original voice alongside its translations instead of only the translations.

5. 5

   Choose what gets imported

   The Assets step is the one place the wizard hands you real control. It lists what the scan found in three groups and lets you tick exactly what comes in. The defaults are sensible, so most people click straight past it.

   1Text622Fonts93Audio2,841

   Game files are ticked for you. Engine built-ins are left out.

   • Silksong/Content/Localization/Game/en
   • Silksong/Content/UI/Menus.locres
   • Engine/Content/Localization/Engine

   Some games list very few text files here, or none that are ticked. That is usually correct rather than a fault. What this list shows is translation bundles, and the engine's own built-in ones are listed but left unticked because nobody translates them. A game can have nothing else to show: S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 lists eight files, all of them engine built-ins, and not one bundle of its own.

   Text kept inside the game's own assets never appears in this list and is imported anyway. Some games keep their entire script that way, in a single asset holding every line in every language they ship. When everything found is a built-in the step says so plainly, so an empty selection does not read as something that went wrong.

6. 6

   Confirm and finish

   The final screen shows everything the wizard gathered, in four cards. If something looks off, click Edit on that card (or the step in the bar) to fix it before finishing.

   GameEdit

   NameHollow Knight: Silksong

   DeveloperTeam Cherry

   EngineUnreal Engine 5

   Folder/Games/Silksong

   LanguagesEdit

   Sources (1)English

   Targets (1)Japanese

   Voice (1)English

   ProcessingEdit

   Text files62

   Font files9

   Audio clips1,402 of 2,841

   SetupEdit

   MethodManual

   Archives14

   ToolsAll available

   Everything looks good.Hit Create game to finish setup and jump into the game page. You can change any of this later.

   Finishing starts the import, and the last screen shows it running: a pipeline down the left, the live log down the right. The pipeline lists only the stages this game needs. A game with no translation bundles to extract does not show the three extraction stages at all, and a translation with no audio does not show the two audio ones, so the ticks and the counter agree with each other.

   A stage that was expected but had nothing to do ends up marked nothing to do rather than sitting on "pending" after the build says it is complete, and it stops counting against the total, so a finished import reads "7 of 7" rather than "7 of 9".

   Every stage says what it is working on. Reading a game's script out of its own packages can take minutes with no file count to show, so those stages name what they are sweeping through in the log rather than going quiet, and the ones that can count show a fraction beside the bar. A stage that genuinely cannot know how much work is left shows no fraction at all, because a number over zero is worse than no number.

   Colour in the log follows how a line went, not which stage said it. Blue and green are ordinary progress, amber is worth a look, and red only ever means something failed. If the log has no red in it, nothing went wrong.

What the scan is actually doing#

The scan is the only genuinely technical part of the wizard, and it helps to know what it's up to while the log scrolls. It runs in order, and each stage can stop the one after it:

The log also says what a build will be able to do with what it found, before anything is imported: the codecs the voices are cooked in, how many clips can never take a dub and why (a sound bank, an IoStore container, a codec with no encoder), and any text files whose strings cannot be written back yet. Knowing this here saves recording two hundred lines that a build would then have to leave out.

Leaving before you finish#

The moment you pick a game folder, Tranzio makes a folder of its own for the game and starts filling it: the scan writes every string it reads into it, and each step after that saves your choices there. So walking away part-way through isn't free, and the wizard says so rather than letting you find out later.

Click anything that would take you somewhere else, or use the back gesture, and the wizard stops you and asks. Staying puts you back on the step you were on, exactly as you left it. Choosing to leave stops the work, deletes the half-made game, and takes you where you were heading. There's no undo for it, which is why it's a question and not a toast.

What happens next#

The game appears in your Games library with its own progress bar sitting at zero, and the Workspace section of the sidebar lights up for it. From here your path runs through the Workspace screens in whatever order suits you, though most people go: Translate for the text, Fonts so the alphabet displays, optionally Audio Lab for voices, and finally Build to turn it all into a patch.