I built a bilingual (English + Chinese) localization for Pillars of Eternity, mainly as a way to deal with how hard CRPG writing is to fully understand as a non-native speaker.
The idea is simple: show both languages side by side for story text, while keeping UI text clean.
What surprised me was how much of localization quality comes down to context—small tone shifts, word choices, and lines that only make sense when you actually play the scene.
This post walks through the design, workflow (with AI in the loop), and a few real examples where translations subtly go wrong.
> “迷住了” means fascinated — as if the tear in his clothes was beautiful or interesting. But transfixed here means something closer to staring vacantly, the way someone might stare at nothing when they’re embarrassed, or lost in thought.
That's interesting, because as a native English speaker, that's not how I think of transfixed - which is more that something is causing you to think deeply about something. It's usual use is in religious experiences, but also when something significant is happening that causes you to stop doing what you were doing before to watch / understand / meditate on it.
"You see a man wearing simple but mostly neat clothes. He’s transfixed, however, by a ragged tear in the seam of his tunic." To me, that means he's look at the guy and trying to figure out why a guy who's wearing neat clothes (even though they are cheap) has a ragged tear in his tunic. The use of ragged is also interesting - it suggests more than that the clothing has worn out, but that he was maybe attacked by another person or animal.
I'm learning Chinese and to me, 迷 feels like it embodies an important sense of the word (but maybe only because I don't know any better translations), and I think maybe 迷惑 is the closest to the meaning from the vocabulary I currently know.
But anyway, back to the project - it's a great idea, and I really like it. When I'm watching Chinese dramas to learn, I like downloading ones that have hard-coded Chinese subs and and English .srt so I can watch with both sets at once (moving the English subs up usually so they're not on top of each other). I think it helps a lot.
I built a bilingual (English + Chinese) localization for Pillars of Eternity, mainly as a way to deal with how hard CRPG writing is to fully understand as a non-native speaker.
The idea is simple: show both languages side by side for story text, while keeping UI text clean.
What surprised me was how much of localization quality comes down to context—small tone shifts, word choices, and lines that only make sense when you actually play the scene.
This post walks through the design, workflow (with AI in the loop), and a few real examples where translations subtly go wrong.
> “迷住了” means fascinated — as if the tear in his clothes was beautiful or interesting. But transfixed here means something closer to staring vacantly, the way someone might stare at nothing when they’re embarrassed, or lost in thought.
That's interesting, because as a native English speaker, that's not how I think of transfixed - which is more that something is causing you to think deeply about something. It's usual use is in religious experiences, but also when something significant is happening that causes you to stop doing what you were doing before to watch / understand / meditate on it.
"You see a man wearing simple but mostly neat clothes. He’s transfixed, however, by a ragged tear in the seam of his tunic." To me, that means he's look at the guy and trying to figure out why a guy who's wearing neat clothes (even though they are cheap) has a ragged tear in his tunic. The use of ragged is also interesting - it suggests more than that the clothing has worn out, but that he was maybe attacked by another person or animal.
I'm learning Chinese and to me, 迷 feels like it embodies an important sense of the word (but maybe only because I don't know any better translations), and I think maybe 迷惑 is the closest to the meaning from the vocabulary I currently know.
But anyway, back to the project - it's a great idea, and I really like it. When I'm watching Chinese dramas to learn, I like downloading ones that have hard-coded Chinese subs and and English .srt so I can watch with both sets at once (moving the English subs up usually so they're not on top of each other). I think it helps a lot.
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