Have you ever wondered how do games localize their games? what do we mean by localization? Localization is when you add multiple language support in your game. What if a player does not understand English but rather Arabic? Can we make a game that can run with multiple languages? With Unity, the answer is simply YES! Here are the simplest way you can make your game support multiple languages.
Once you import the localization package from Unity’s Package Manager you need to start setting up Unity’s Localization system by going to the Project Settings and then Localization. From there, click on Locale Generator. This where you will be presented with all the languages that Unity supports and all what you have to do is to check the languages that you want to support and press Generate Locales.
Once you do that you will see the following two locales appearing in the available locales windows in the project settings:
From there, all what you have to do is to create your Localization Table. Go to Window, Asset Management and then Localization Tables. From there Click on New Table Collection
Give you table a name and click on Create String Table Collection. The table will be created and now you are ready to start creating your text and translations.
Lets say you have a UI Button that starts the game, the text on the button says “Start Game” and you want the player to switch the language and once the language is switched is should display “ابدأ اللعبة” in arabic. All what you need to do is to add a key and the sentence in the languages you support as shown in figure 4.
As you can see in figure 4. the key is a unique identifier for that translation and then under each column that corresponds to a language the translation is mentioned appropriately.
Now, how do we link that to the UI Text of the button? It is really simple to do that. All what you have to do is you need to add a component to the UI Text that is childed to the UI Button called “Localize String Event”. In that component, you need to do three things:
- In the String Reference, select from the table the key corresponding to the text you want to have in that button.
- In Element 0, Reference the Text component existing on that game object.
- In the Update String Event, add an event and reference the Text Component and then in the functions select the text property of the Text Component. This will allow the localization table to add the appropriate text depending on the selected language to the Text component.
Once you do that, it should work out of the box; and here is how it looks like this:
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