スキーリゾート and Esquí: Two New Languages
Ski Resort Empire now speaks Japanese and Latin American Spanish. One for personal reasons, one for reach. What it took beyond translating the texts: a font for kanji, line breaks without spaces, an old lift attendant who speaks casually, and a Spanish that works from Mexico to Argentina.
Until this week the game spoke German, English, Italian and French. Now there are six: Japanese and Latin American Spanish joined. The two have very different reasons behind them.
Japanese, because I wanted it
This one is simply personal preference. There is no market analysis behind it. The game already has a Japanese region, Yukihana, and I wanted the game itself to be playable in Japanese too, even though Japanese is by far the hardest of the six languages to support.
Spanish, because of reach
Spanish is the opposite case: a business decision. It is one of the most spoken languages in the world, and Google Play lets me reach all of Latin America with a single store listing (es-419). The game sells crystal packs with lower prices in lower-income countries, so it is not only about downloads.
I chose neutral Latin American Spanish, not the Spanish of Spain. Players in Spain understand it fine, but the reverse is not always true. That meant a few rules:
- "Tú" everywhere, never "vos" or "vosotros".
- Words that work across the region: góndola for the gondola lift, champaña rather than cava. No slang from one country.
- Brand names stay as they are: Ski Resort Empire, Ski Resort Group, Winterfest and the region names are never translated.
- Staff roles have a female form. A lift attendant is operador or operadora de remonte, depending on the person. In German that already worked, in Japanese it isn't needed, in Spanish it is.
Spanish plurals also need a third form for very large numbers, like Italian and French. In an idle game, where amounts reach millions within minutes, that matters.
What Japanese needed beyond the text
The translation itself was the smaller part. Japanese touched the layout, the fonts and the voice of the game.
A font for kanji. The game uses Fredoka for headings and Nunito for numbers. Neither has Japanese characters. I added M PLUS Rounded 1c, a rounded Japanese font that fits the soft look of the others. It is only loaded for kana and kanji, so players in other languages never download it.
Line breaks without spaces. Japanese doesn't separate words with spaces, so a browser may break a line in the middle of a word. The game now breaks Japanese lines between phrases instead. Units follow Japanese style too: "10%" and "5分", without the space that German and French put in front of them.
The logo. The splash screen draws its title as an SVG and measures the letters to fit them. Kana and kanji are much wider than Latin letters, so スキーリゾート / エンパイア at first ran off the screen. It now counts them as full-width characters.
Two voices. The interface speaks politely, in the usual です/ます form of Japanese apps. Sepp, the old lift attendant who tells the story, does not. He talks casually and calls himself わし, the way an old man from the mountains would. In German he speaks dialect, so this keeps his character in every language.
No plurals. Japanese has no plural forms at all, which sounds easier but means every text that says "1 crystal" or "5 crystals" has to read naturally with a single form.
Checked, not just translated
Both translations were done with AI help, then reviewed in a second pass that only looked for problems: wrong tone, unnatural phrasing, inconsistent names. That pass changed the Japanese game title to スキーリゾート・エンパイア and the Winterfest to ウィンターフェスティバル, and it caught that brand names had been translated in a few Spanish texts.
The game also checks itself. Every language must contain every text, or the build fails. A missing line can't slip through to players.
On Google Play
Both languages have their own store listing: title, short and full description. The Japanese listing already has its own screenshots, taken from the game in Japanese. The Spanish one still uses the English screenshots for now.
Next
The analytics will show whether players from Latin America and Japan actually find the game, and how far they get.