Turian speaks three new languages

Starting today, this website is available in three new languages: Português (pt-br), 日本語 (Japanese), and 简体中文 (Simplified Chinese), alongside the original English.

Japan and China host two of the most active and influential game development communities anywhere, with a huge base of indie developers, engine tinkerers, and studios who prefer reading technical documentation in their own language. If Turian is going to be a real option for building games, it needs to speak to those communities directly, not just assume everyone is comfortable reading English.

This isn't a new lesson for me. Around 2005, I created the Drupal localization server, the system that managed translations for Drupal Core and thousands of contributed modules. Working on that project taught me that localization isn't just about translating text—it's about lowering the barrier for people to join a community and contribute. I want Turian to follow the same philosophy.

A word on quality, though, so expectations are set correctly: I'm Brazilian, and Portuguese is my native language. Like the other languages, the pt-BR version follows the same translation workflow, but unlike the others, I'm able to review and refine it myself over time. While I can't promise every page has already been manually curated, I expect the Portuguese version to gradually become the closest to the English original in both accuracy and naturalness.

The Japanese and Simplified Chinese translations, on the other hand, are produced automatically. I speak, but very little, of either language, so I can't personally verify nuance, tone, or the occasional mistranslated technical term. They should be good enough to be useful, but please don't be surprised if you spot an awkward phrase or an outright error here and there. If you're a native speaker and want to help fix something, contributions are very welcome — check the "Edit this page" link on any docs page.

To keep this honest, every page with automatic translation will be clearly signed as such, explaining that the content was machine-translated rather than reviewed by a human.

One more clarification: this localization effort covers the website only. Turian Studio (the editor) and the turian-cli tool are still English-only for now. Translating the actual software's UI is a much bigger job than translating docs, and it's on the roadmap for later, once the tooling itself stabilizes further.

If you're a developer in Brazil, Japan, China—or anywhere else—and want to see Turian improve in your language, come say hi on Discord or Matrix. Whether you'd like to review existing translations, fix terminology, or help bring Turian to an entirely new language, contributions are very welcome. As new language communities form, we can also create dedicated Discord and Matrix rooms so contributors have a place to collaborate in their own language.

Spanish would be a natural next step, but I'm equally interested in German, Korean, French, Polish, Russian, or any language with an active game development community. If your language isn't listed yet, that's not a limitation—it's an invitation.