Localisation
Charisma supports localising your stories into different languages, to give more players the ability to play your excellent creations!
Charisma currently supports localisation into Arabic, Chinese, English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Thai and Turkish.
You can use different languages with our SDKs, or please contact us if you're interested in developing a web comic experience in other languages.
Getting started
Note that enabling this feature will use credits. For more details, please view the licencing docs.
To get started, toggle on the 'Is localisation available?' checkbox on the Story Overview page.
If you’re writing your story originally in English:
- In the top-left corner of the story editor sidebar, click on the button labelled English and choose another language from the dropdown list entitled Add a new language. Press the green plus to add that language. You can add several languages if you wish!
- You’ll now be able to toggle between English and your other selected language(s). (When you switch to a language other than English, your character and player nodes will all be empty. Don’t worry about this!)
- In the sidebar on the left of your screen, select Localisation. This takes you to a page which allows you to generate and edit your translations for graph nodes, custom categories, custom intents, and generation prompts. You can toggle between these using the tabs at the top of the Localisation page.
- On the graph nodes tab, you will see two columns of text. These are all of your character and player nodes, in their original language on the left, and in translation on the right.
- Make sure you have selected English from the left-hand column dropdown and the language you want to translate into from the right-hand column drop down. Now click on the button labelled Auto-translate all graph nodes. This will generate a translation of all of your character and player nodes. Do this for all of your chosen languages. Then repeat the process in the custom categories and custom intent tabs, if you are using these. If you are using generation nodes, you can review them on the Generation Prompts tab. The English prompt may be sufficient for all language experiences but varies depending on how the Generation is used.
- The translation is made by an online translator. You’ll need to check the accuracy of the translation, making any edits in the textboxes on the localisation page.
- When you return to your graph and toggle between your different languages, the nodes will now be populated with the translations. You’ll also be able to preview your story in your chosen languages.
- If you make further edits to your story, return to the localisation page and repeat the translation process to ensure all of the nodes in your graph are translated.
Note, you don’t have to write your story originally in English! For example, you could write it initially in French, and then translate to English or any other language.
If you’re not editing in the original language, you can view the corresponding original content for each node in the graph by hovering over the textboxes in a character or player node.
The chat tester will automatically adapt to whichever language is currently selected.
Language gate conditions
You can set a language condition on a gate, checking whether a player is playing or not playing in a specific language. This is useful for showing certain content to players in a specific language.
Perhaps you have content that doesn’t translate well into another language, or you just really have to tell English players about this character’s love of tea. Pop in a language condition and you’re all set!
Generative AI dialogue features
Improvisation (Pro stories only) and generation nodes can be used in localised stories.
If improvisation is enabled on the story overview screen, it will work automatically when you localise your story.
Like player and character nodes, generation nodes are cleared when you localise a story. Select Localisation in the editor sidebar and select the Generation Prompts tab. From here you can copy each prompt from the original language, or automatically translate it. You may not need a translated prompt, and every use case is different. It's important to test your generation results in the different languages.
Writing pointers
Charisma’s automatic translator won’t provide a perfect translation of your story – you’ll need to check this yourself (or find someone else who can)! But there are a few things to bear in mind which will make the translation process more straightforward:
- Keep your sentences simple. Avoid complicated grammatical constructions where possible.
- Be careful with colloquial language. The Charisma platform is designed to foster conversations, and you don’t want your story to lose its voice or personality – but colloquial phrases can sound unnatural when translated automatically, so you’ll want to check these parts of your translation in particular.
- Remember register and gender. Lots of languages have a formal and informal version of the pronoun “you”. Lots of languages also have gendered nouns and corresponding adjectives. Check for consistency in the translations of your story nodes – the automatic translator may not get it right every time!
- Make sure you test your player nodes in all the languages you’re using, especially if you’re using our general intents. Matching will perform slightly differently in different languages, so you may find that it’s helpful to add some additional player node suggestions or a custom intent to capture your player’s responses as accurately as possible.