Localizing a mobile game into Ukrainian

Situation

A mobile game developer was adding Ukrainian: the Ukrainian audience was growing, and players kept requesting the language in reviews. The material was typical for a game project: interface strings, character dialogue, in-game notifications, and the game’s App Store and Google Play pages.

Task

Deliver a localization that feels native to players: no officialese on buttons, no literally translated jokes, no strings spilling out of the interface.

How we did it

1. Playing the game first. The translators started by actually playing: without context, localization becomes guesswork — the same string can be a button or a heading.
2. A glossary of the game world. Character names, locations, items, and mechanics went into a glossary — so the “dawn sword” wouldn’t turn into the “morning blade” one screen later.
3. Translating within interface limits. Length-capped strings got compact phrasings: Ukrainian runs longer than English on average, and that has to be planned for from the start.
4. Adaptation where literal fails. Jokes, references, and wordplay were rewritten to work in Ukrainian; key passages were agreed with the developer.
5. Linguistic testing. The final pass happened inside the game: we checked how the texts looked on screen and fixed truncations and awkward line breaks.

Result

The game shipped with a complete Ukrainian localization — from the “Play” button to the store pages. Content updates are translated under the same glossary, so new strings come out fast and in the same voice.

Worth knowing

• Localizing a game without context access (screenshots, a build, or scene descriptions) always costs quality — build context into the process with the developer.
• App Store and Google Play pages are part of the localization: they’re the first thing a player sees.
• The game-world glossary is critical across updates: without it, the style drifts with every patch.