Four More Languages, and the Map Picks One

1.6.05 put the map into Portuguese and Japanese. This adds Spanish and Chinese, and both of those turned out to be two languages rather than one, so the Language row in Map Settings now holds seven options. The map also stops waiting for you to find that row: on a first visit it reads the language your browser asks for and uses it.

Two Spanishes, two Chineses

I expected to add one Spanish and one Chinese and found that the game does not work that way.

The two Spanish versions are not spelling variants of each other. Six of the seven location names differ outright: a Township is an Aldea in Latin American Spanish and a Villa in European Spanish, an Evergaol is a Prisión eterna or a Cárcel eterna, and the Great Hollow comes out as Gran Vacío against Hoyo abismal, which do not share a word. Bosses split the same way — the one the site calls Morgott is Aojo Cruel in one and Augurio Caído in the other. Picking a single Spanish would have meant half the Spanish-speaking players reading a name from someone else's country, so the site carries both.

Chinese splits the other way. 场景头目 and 場景頭目 are the same words written in simplified and traditional characters, not different choices of wording. Both are still real versions in the game's own text, so both are taken from there rather than converted by script, which is where errors would creep in.

Every boss, item and location name comes from the game, matched entry by entry between the seven versions. None of it is my translation.

One thing that had to change for Chinese and Japanese to read properly: labels break across two lines by looking for a space, and neither language uses spaces between words. Every name would have stretched out in one long line across the map. They now break on the characters that join words instead, and the list of those characters is per language, since the Japanese ones do not occur in Chinese.

The map now guesses

If you have never picked a language, the map reads what your browser asks for and uses it. Brazilian and Portuguese browsers get Portuguese, Mexican and Argentine ones get Latin American Spanish, Spain gets its own, Taiwan and Hong Kong get traditional Chinese, the mainland gets simplified. Anything else gets English.

If you have picked a language, that wins and nothing is guessed. The choice is the first thing checked, and detection does not run at all when one exists.

What is deliberately not saved is the guess itself. If the guessed language were stored, someone visiting today in a language the site does not have yet would be stamped as an English reader and stay that way after the language arrived. Leaving it unsaved means the guess is made fresh each visit and follows the list as it grows.

Since a map that changes language on its own is confusing without a reason, a note sits under the Settings button saying the language was detected, in that language. Clicking it opens Map Settings at the row where you can change it. It goes away once you use it, or once you pick any language yourself.

Still English below the map

The same limit as last time: this is the map, its modals, its markers and its labels. The guides, the FAQ and the writing under each seed result are still English, and moving those needs a separate address for each language, which is its own piece of work.

Anything not yet translated falls back to English rather than coming out blank.