Multi-language game page content

[hsandt]

This is a GitHub ticket for the existing forum threads:

Multilingual game pages? from 2017, leafo showed interested, but archived

Ability to translate games' pages without creating new projects from just 2 days ago (June 2024)

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

The issue is that to write game description and other text in multiple languages, you have to duplicate the description into multiple versions, one per language, and put the very long block of text in the single description. Users have to scroll to see the one corresponding to their language.

Describe the solution you'd like

Like Steam, the objective is to offer creators a way to rewrite the game tagline, description and other textual content in multiple languages, and let the user switch between them in one click (with a list of favorite languages, ordered by priority, in the user settings - using browser language if not logged in, but allowing user to change language at any time).

In addition, like Steam, screenshots and video links could also be customized based on language (for YouTube videos, YouTube has its own language system, but for screenshots it would be helpful if displayed text matters).

I guess devlogs could also benefit from that.

Describe alternatives you've considered

A. Folding with details tag

You can use <details> tags to make them foldable, but it can cause troubles when working in an external Markdown editor as many show such text as preformatted monospace code, making it less pleasant to edit. This is the case of Typora and MarkText.

but not Zettlr nor Obsidian which will display the HTML text as usual, although without formatting italics or bold:

EDIT: Now I tried it on a game page, and while not super convenient to edit (I make sure to prepare the translated Markdown on a different page, then copy paste it inside the <details> tag for minimum rework), it did work:

https://komehara.itch.io/powder

But to avoid having an empty page I decided to keep the English visible at all times, which means visitors who read the Japanese text must still scroll through the English text to access the downloads.

B. External page

You can host an external page on your blog with the game's description, but not everybody can/wants to do that.

Additional context
I am sharing my games with Japanese and Korean people and some have difficulties reading long texts in English. I don't always have time to translate the full game so translating the game description including summary and controls would at least allow them to play.

It seems that all major stores (Steam, GoG...) have multi-language pages, while Gamejolt, another indie game store, has the same issue: https://gamejolt.com/f/multi-language-tabs-for-game-pages/342903?sort=top (thread is old, haven't tried to create a page myself yet). Different indie stores are generally targeted as the Asian market. However, sites like Playism do, in fact, support English, Japanese and Chinese (but they are not places where anyone can subscribe and upload games, they are still curated stores).

[Al-the-Procrastinator]

Yeah, it would be really nice to have this feature!
I'm not an English-speaking developer, and my entire audience is non-English-speaking pals, because I haven't finished my project yet, and it would be tiring to manage several social networks in different languages.
Therefore, if I have to show a description of my project in a certain hierarchy on one page, this will be problematic, because the site is English, and my current audience would have to scroll through the whole page to find the part they need.
In addition, a lot of text with repeated images looks ugly, while a nice design is one of the main ways to attract new people.