Translate a Unity or Godot game into German

What German does to a game interface

German typically runs 20 to 35 % longer than English, and the growth hits short UI words hardest. Settings becomes Einstellungen, Load becomes Spielstand laden, and Music volume can become Hintergrundmusiklautstärke, a single compound with no natural break point. A button sized for English can see its label double in width.

• Capitals: every noun is capitalised (das Schwert, die Truhe). Labels forced to upper case by your renderer are unaffected; anything in normal case is.
• Characters: ä, ö, ü, ß and their capitals must exist in your fonts. A TextMeshPro atlas in Unity or a Godot font limited to ASCII will show empty boxes.
• Quotation marks: German uses „…“, so quoted speech inside dialogue changes its marks.

Plurals, du versus Sie, and moving placeholders

German has only two CLDR plural categories, one and other, and one applies to exactly 1. Zero takes the plural: 0 Münzen, not 0 Münze. If your code was written around a language that treats 0 as singular, such as French, check the condition before shipping German.

Register matters too. Most games address the player informally with du (Drücke E, um die Tür zu öffnen), while business software uses Sie. A game that switches between the two from one screen to the next looks careless: check the form chosen in the free sample, then its consistency across the translation.

Word order shifts as well, with the verb often moving to the end. {player} found {item} becomes {player} hat {item} gefunden. Placeholders move; they must not vanish or be translated, which is exactly what Manuce checks.

What Manuce returns, and what it does not do

Manuce works on the string table exported as CSV: one key column, one column per language. The de column is filled if present, added if not. You get the same file back: indentation, key order, quotes, comments, line endings, encoding and BOM are preserved; only the values change.

• Every translated value is compared with the source: {0}, %d, Godot BBCode such as [b]…[/b] or TextMeshPro tags such as <color=#FFCC00> must all still be there. If a mismatch persists, the source value is kept and the report says so.
• Not translated: keys, empty values, URLs, email addresses, numbers, colours, date formats, identifiers, and anything marked as non-translatable.
• The report lists translated strings, strings left as they were, and why.

Manuce never sees your game running: it does not resize buttons, add glyphs to fonts, or handle textures with baked-in text or voice-over. Nor does it produce sworn or certified translations, should a legal text ship with the game.

Preparing the CSV and checking after reimport

Before uploading:

• Export the full table with an up-to-date source column. An empty source string stays empty.
• Make sure names you want kept as they are (the game title, a faction) are marked non-translatable; otherwise check them in the free sample and in the delivered file.
• If one word serves two contexts (Fire as an action and as an element), two separate keys translate better than one shared key.

After reimporting:

• Walk through the menus in German looking for overflow in buttons, tabs, tooltips and subtitles.
• Display a string containing ß and Ü to test the font atlas.
• Test a counter at 0, 1 and 2.
• Review the strings the report left in the source language and fix their markup if needed.

In practice

1. Export your game's string table as CSV from Unity or Godot.
2. Upload it, choose German and read the free sample (du or Sie, proper names).
3. Download the same CSV with the de column filled, plus the report.
4. Reimport it and test long labels, fonts and plurals in-game.