Skydex now speaks twelve languages
Until today the language menu offered five languages, and only two of them were complete. Ukrainian and English covered the whole game. German, French and Spanish covered about half of it: the settings, the controller calibration, the Exchange, the race editor, the radar and most of the flight HUD quietly switched back to English, because nobody had translated those screens yet. If you picked Deutsch you got a game that was German until you opened the settings.
That gap is closed. All five original languages now have every string the game uses.
Seven new languages
We also looked at where people actually come from. Over the last 30 days the biggest groups without their own language were Brazil and Portugal, the Gulf and Jordan, the Netherlands, Poland, Turkey, Japan and Italy. So the menu now also has:
- Português (Brazilian Portuguese)
- Italiano
- Nederlands
- Polski
- Türkçe
- 日本語
- العربية
The game picks your browser's language on the first visit. To change it, open Settings → General → Language in the game, or use the globe button on the other pages: it sits in the top bar on wider screens and at the bottom of every page, including on a phone. If you are signed in, the choice follows your account to other devices.
What to expect
These seven languages load only when you choose one, so the page does not get heavier for everyone else. On the first visit in a new language the dictionary arrives with the page; you should not see English flash before it.
Arabic text now runs right to left. The layout itself has not been mirrored yet: the map stays on the right, the chat on the left, the buttons where they were. Mirroring the whole flight HUD is a bigger job, and we would rather ship the language now than wait for it.
The pages outside the game are translated too: the station leaderboard and each station's page, your profile and collection, the aircraft, airline, ship and flag pages, the network maps, races, leaderboards, ranks, achievements, seasons, your fleet, your hangar and the receiver dashboard. That is a bit over two thousand strings, in all eleven languages.
The text the server writes for a page is translated as well: the descriptions and fact sheets on aircraft type, airline, airport, ship, flag and shipyard pages, the directory introductions and their questions, the breadcrumb trail, the station and network pages, and the page title you see in the browser tab. The server follows the language you picked in the game; if you never picked one, it follows your browser.
Some things are still English in every language: the news, the city and country pages you reach from search, the picture that appears when you share a link (a chat app has no idea which language you read), messages in our Discord, and the privacy policy. Legal text gets translated only after a person has checked it. Names of aircraft types, airlines, cities and countries come from our data and stay as they are there.
Found a bad translation?
The new languages were translated in one pass. If a button says something odd, or a word that means one thing in English came out as another, tell us in Discord in the bug-reports channel with a screenshot. Short labels are the easiest to get wrong, because they come with the least context, and they are also the ones you see the most.