New hires at an overseas office, colleagues from other countries, a project team spread across several time zones. More organizations than you'd expect have to run onboarding content in two or more languages. And most start the same way: build everything in one language, then send it out for translation.
First Run started in Korean and English, added Japanese, and recently added Spanish as its fourth language. That meant moving the game screens, thousands of quest sentences, the manual, the site pages and the blog all at once. This article sets out the problems we actually ran into, and the rules we'll keep the next time we add a language.
Decide first: a glossary
When several people share a translation, the same word gets translated in different ways. In the game, "quest" is misión; in the manual it becomes tarea; on the blog it turns into desafío. A new hire can't tell whether these are the same thing.
So we built a glossary before translating anything. The core is the words that appear often and show up on screen.
- Basic game words: quest, Review Board, badge, achievement, level, hint, Play Report
- The four grades: Excellent, Good, Risky, Poor
- Role names and job titles
- Workplace terms: the words a new hire hears in their first week in each industry
There were still gaps. Partway through, we found the campus building names weren't in the glossary, and the people translating the story and the people translating the interface were about to use different names. Button names quoted in the manual had the same problem. If the manual says "press Lock in this answer" and the real button is translated differently, a new hire can't find it on screen. A glossary isn't a document you write once. You keep adding the words you find while you work.
Decide first: what not to translate
As important as the glossary is a list of what not to translate: product names, company names, people's names, and the acronyms used as they are on site. In a semiconductor fab, OCAP, MOC and LOTO, and on a construction site, TBM, are used as they are on Spanish-speaking sites too. Spelling them out might look friendlier in the game, but new hires would have to learn them again on the real job.
Instead, we added a short explanation the first time each one appears. The Spanish edition of the construction map gives the meaning on first use, as in "TBM (charla de seguridad)". On the map set in a Japanese co-op, Japanese institutions such as 見守り (mimamori, the watch on older members) and 班 (han, group delivery) stay in romanized form with a short Spanish explanation. Swapping an institution for a similar one from another country would put the story out of step with its setting.
Keep the answers, localize the rest
The first rule we set for moving scenario quests was not to change the judgment criteria. Whatever language you play in, the Excellent answer has to be the same option. Only then can a multilingual team compare Play Reports on the same terms.
What has to change is what differs by language and region.
- Number formats: "2,000" in English can be read as a decimal in parts of the Spanish-speaking world, so we wrote "2000".
- Institutions such as emergency numbers: 119 in the Japanese co-op quests stays as it is, but the Spanish edition adds "(emergencias)" so readers know what it is.
- Punctuation and quotation marks: Spanish puts question and exclamation marks at both ends of a sentence. Japanese uses 「」.
- Legal requirements: laws on safety training and personal data differ from country to country. Every language edition says the same thing: the quests use fictional companies to practice the order of judgment, and they don't replace any country's mandatory training.
Set the form of address once, use it everywhere
Korean has formal and casual speech levels, and Spanish likewise has two ways of saying "you": the familiar tú and the formal usted. We chose tú for the game, the site and the blog, and usted for the privacy policy and terms of use. Inside quests, lines where staff speak to members or suppliers use usted where the scene calls for it.
Which one you choose matters less than every translator using the same rule once it's set. If tú and usted are mixed on one screen, it doesn't read as content from the same company.
Longer text breaks the screen
Spanish takes 20 to 30% more space than English to say the same thing. After translation was done, what we fixed most was not sentences but screens.
- Blog share images: a title longer than two lines overlaps the description. Three Spanish titles ran to three lines, so we rewrote them shorter.
- Buttons and cards: to stop long words overflowing on narrow phone screens, we turned on hyphenation for Spanish body text.
- Tables of contents and chips: character limits need to differ by language. Korean and Japanese carry more information per character, so they get shorter limits; English and Spanish get longer ones.
- Grade names: Spanish adjectives change form with gender and number. We treat the grade as a fixed name, "Bueno", and write "the answer marked Bueno", so its form doesn't shift from sentence to sentence.
Fix the language list in every language
There's one place that's easy to miss when adding a language: the sentences that say which languages are supported, like "available in Korean, English and Japanese". Add Spanish only to the Spanish edition and the Korean site still says three languages. We fixed these in every language edition: the FAQ, the manual, the site introduction, and the summaries that search engines and AI tools read. The in-game hint for switching languages also changed from "Korean ↔ English" to wording that cycles through all four.
Checks catch the gaps, not people
A single quest has a situation, a hint, four options each with its own feedback, and learning points. Across four maps, that's thousands of sentences to move into Spanish. It's hard for a person to read them all and find what's missing.
So we built checks alongside the translation.
- A check that counts whether every string with Korean and English also has Spanish. It covers all data shown on screen.
- A check that no Korean or Japanese turns up on Spanish screens. It renders the start screen, profile, Play Report, menu, map, Review Board and story for all four maps and checks each one.
- A fallback that shows English instead of a blank when a translation is missing, so one line the checks missed never leaves a screen empty.
Going through screens one by one also turned up things we had missed for a long time: the header menu, the step indicator and NPC role introductions, which had been stuck in English in every language. They now appear in all four languages too.
Checklist for multilingual onboarding
- Did you build a glossary and a do-not-translate list before translating?
- Do you keep adding words found during the work to the glossary and share it with every translator?
- Do button names quoted in the manual match the translation on the real screen?
- Did you keep the judgment criteria and correct answers the same in every language?
- Did you check what varies by region, such as number formats, punctuation and institutions?
- Did you set a rule for forms of address and tone and apply it to every document?
- Do longer sentences break buttons, cards or share images?
- Did you update the sentences that list supported languages in every language edition?
- Are there automated checks that catch missing translations and screens mixing in another language?
For design rules shared across industries, read Onboarding scenarios for industries beyond IT. The steps for turning documents into scenarios are in From wiki to quest: a 5-step workflow for converting internal docs into onboarding quests.
Try workplace scenarios as onboarding quests
Press L or use the menu in the game to switch languages and compare the same quest in all four. Play the Onboarding