Localisation and Assets

Learn about localizing your Yarn Spinner scripts with Unity.

Localization is the process of translating and adapting content to a specific language, region or culture.

Yarn Spinner Scripts are written in human-readable language. This is generally a single language, and (most of the time) will be written in the language that your development team primarily speaks. The language that a Yarn project is written in is called the base language.

If you want your dialogue to be understood by people who don't speak this language, you will need to translate it.

Yarn Spinner is designed to make it easy to extract the user-facing text of your dialogue into a strings file, which can then be translated into a different language, and then loaded at run-time. You can translate your project into as many languages as you'd like, and Yarn Spinner will handle it for you automatically.

Yarn Spinner will not translate your dialogue for you. It just makes it easy to load translated versions of your dialogue.

Yarn Spinner is also designed around the idea that a line of dialogue may have assets associated with it. Most commonly, this means an audio file that contains an actor performing the line, so that it can be used in your game as a voice-over. These assets are also localisable.

Working with Localisation

Yarn Spinner makes it easy to add multiple languages to your game. The gist is:

  1. Select your Yarn Project in the Assets panel

  2. Click "Export Strings as CSV" in the Inspector

  3. Translate the exported CSV file

  4. Import the translations back into your project

You can use either:

Localisation Terminology

  • Localisation: A set of information that describes where to find text and assets for a given language.

  • Base Language: The language that your Yarn script files are written in.

  • Strings Files: A text document that contains translated versions of Yarn lines.

  • Line ID: A unique code that identifies a line of dialogue or an option in the original source text.

  • Localised Line: The text of a line of dialogue, in a particular locale.

  • Localised Line Asset: An asset (for example, an audio clip) that's associated for a particular line, in a particular locale. For example, an audio clip containing the voiceover for the line "Hello there", in German.

Workflow

To localise your Yarn scripts, you specify the 'base language' that your scripts are written in. You then add unique line ID tags to each line that identify each line. Finally, the localisation system reads your tagged lines and fills the string table for your base language. You can then add additional translations for your lines to the string tables for other languages.

Writing Yarn Scripts

Every Yarn script is associated with a base language. By default, Yarn Spinner sets the base language to that of your current locale. For example, if your computer is set to use Australian English, then Yarn Spinner will use that as the base language.

Adding Line IDs

In order to match different versions of a line, you need to add a line id to each line of dialogue. A line ID is a tag that appears at the end of a line that uniquely identifies a line of dialogue in your game.

Here's an example of a line of dialogue with a line tag:

Gunther: I wanted orange! They gave me lemon-lime. #line:1a64a5

In this example, the line of dialogue has a line ID of 1a64a5.

Yarn Spinner can automatically add line IDs to your dialogue for you. To do this, select your Yarn Project, and click 'Add Line Tags to Scripts'. Yarn Spinner will re-write all of the script files, adding a line ID to any line that doesn't already have one.

Using Localised Content in Games

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