Let’s be real: Most of us treat localization like a post-production chore. You ship the English build, feel great for five minutes, and then the localized strings come back from the agency. Suddenly, your "Start" button in German is “Spiel starten” and it’s bleeding into your "Options" menu. Your elegant UI is now a cluttered disaster.
If you aren’t planning for game UI translation from the first wireframe, you aren’t just making a mistake—you’re building technical debt that will explode right before your gold master.
The Physics of "Bakukuang" (爆框)
We talk a lot about "word counts," but the real killer is character width. English is a compact language. When you move into German, Russian, or French, you’re looking at a 30% to 40% expansion in text length. If you’ve hard-coded your button sizes or text containers, you’re asking for trouble.
In the industry, we call this bakukuang (爆框)—text overflow. My rule of thumb? If your UI doesn't "stretch," it’s broken. I’ve learned to stop using fixed-width boxes entirely. Use Unity’s Content Size Fitters or vertical layout groups. Better yet, run a pseudolocalization pass during the alpha. If your UI can handle 50% longer strings of gibberish without the layout collapsing, you’re actually ready for a global launch.
Unity, Plugins, and Not Losing Your Mind
If you’re still manually importing .csv or .json files in 2025, you’re doing it wrong. Unity game translation plugin support (like I2 or the native Localization package) isn't just a luxury; it’s a sanity saver. These tools handle pluralization and gendered grammar—things that a simple spreadsheet will always, always mess up.
But even the best plugin won't save you from "Tofu" (those □□□ boxes). This happens when your font atlas doesn't support the glyphs for Polish, Thai, or Japanese. You need to verify your font fallback system early. There is nothing that kills a player’s immersion faster than opening a menu and seeing a string of empty boxes because you forgot to include Cyrillic support in your SDF font.
LQA: The Only Way to Catch "Context" Fails
This is where the mobile game localization cost starts to feel justified. A translator looking at a spreadsheet doesn't know if the word "Open" is a button to open a door or an adjective describing a store status.
This is why LQA (Linguistic Quality Assurance) is non-negotiable. You need someone actually playing the build, looking at the UI in context, and catching the overlap issues or the cultural "misses" that a machine or a blind translator would never see. According to the latest data from Slator, games that invest in a dedicated LQA phase see significantly higher Day-1 retention in non-English markets. It’s the difference between looking like a global studio and looking like a sloppy port.
A Partner Who Actually Gets the Dev Side
You don't need another agency that just dumps translated text back into your inbox. You need a team that understands the "why" behind the code. Artlangs Translation has been in the trenches for years, and they actually understand the technical friction of game localization.
They handle over 230 languages, but more importantly, they understand the workflow. Whether it’s video localization, short drama subtitle localization, or multi-language dubbing, they bring a level of technical precision that’s rare. They’ve done everything from multi-language data annotation to complex game UI translation for titles that have scaled globally. They know where the "tofu" hides and how to prevent your UI from breaking in the first place.
