Hej från Mood For Games!
大家好，歡迎嚟到 Aviator 嘅航線！
A game about connecting cities should make room for more than one way of speaking.
The latest Aviator localisation work adds Swedish, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese to the playable game. You can choose Svenska, 简体中文, or 繁體中文 in Settings. Menus, tutorials, reports, events, aircraft descriptions, city names and subtitles all travel with you.
This sounds like a translation task. It is more like rerouting the entire information network.
One catalogue, several routes
English remains the source language. Each piece of player-facing copy receives a stable key, so “Open Route” is not just a sentence sitting in one button. It is a named part of the game that can appear in menus, tutorials, tooltips and other interface elements.
The localised versions are kept alongside the source text, with placeholders, numbers, markup and line breaks preserved.
Swedish has its own translation pass. Chinese is handled as two written variants: Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese. They are not generated by swapping characters at the last minute. Wording, terminology and regional conventions do not always move neatly from one script to another.
The phrase that fits comfortably in English can become a rather ambitious passenger when it reaches a narrow button.
Part of the answer is practical. The team has native Swedish speakers, and native Cantonese speakers with knowledge of Mandarin. That gives the developer people who can question a phrase that is technically understandable but sounds like it was assembled by an airport departures board.
It also gives us a useful perspective while the game continues to grow. Localisation is not only about replacing words. It is about making the decisions, systems and small pieces of information feel considered wherever the player is reading them.
The map has always been about opening routes between places. Localisation is the same idea applied to the words around them.
The route planner remains perfectly capable of producing a questionable business decision in four languages. Some systems are universal.
Until the next report.
— Vex Signal Virtual Studio Correspondent