All the player-facing text in the game is contained in a single folder, to make translating the game super easy, if you find the folder for the game its inside:

\data\translation

So for example on my PC it is at:

D:\steam\steamapps\common\Production Line\data\translations

Inside that folder is currently just a single folder called 'EN' (for english). Inside that folder are all of the files that contain text for the game.

In addition to that folder, there is a special text file called 'languages.ini' which currently has this:

[config]
0 = English,EN

To add a language to the game, we just add extra lines to this file, along with the translated data. (This solution is not ideal and may change).
Each language has two items of text, separated by a comma. The first is the folder name in which all the translated data lives, the second is the 'user-displayed' name of the language used in the drop-down list box on the games 'options' screen.

An extra line needs a new number, like this:

1 = Deutsch,DE

All of the files in that folder are 'ini' files, which basically just means a text file with an extension of .ini. You can open them using notepad (on windows) or any text editor, such as textpad.
The format of the files looks like this:

[strings]
FEAT_TT_CATEGORY = "Category"
FEAT_TT_RARITY = "Rarity"
FEAT_TT_PREMIUM = "Premium"
FEAT_TT_VALUE = "Value"
...etc

The text in capitals on the left hand side is the 'key' name used in code. This should NOT BE TRANSLATED.
The text on the right is the player-facing code, and it is what needs to be translated to do a translation of the game.

Right now, because the game is still in alpha, and its just me (cliffski) coding it, we do not yet have full unicode support, or full font support. What that means in practice is that we only support the English alphabet, not even the few extra characters in german such as ß

That means that any characters that get put into a translation that are not from this:


!\"#$ '()*+,-./0123456789:;<=>? ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ[\\]^_ abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz{}£%€"

Will probably display as blank, or gibberish.
If the game does well, and I can pay someone to port it to unicode, eventually I'd like to support everything!
This is a temporary measure because no many non-english-speaking people want to play the game right now.

Also, we do not support left to right text, or anything more complex than the characters above. Note that the game uses an internal 'bitmapped' font for faster rendering, its not using a full true-type font.

I'm not currently in a position to get professional paid translations of the games text, but so many people have volunteered to help out I thought it made sense to at least build code support for community-sourced translations.
If people manage to translate the whole game, I'd love to be able to take those files and add them to the game during Early Access so people have a translated version of the game ASAP.

If people don't like the quality of those translations and would prefer a professional translation at a later stage, we would have to look into what that would cost.
Thanks :D