A Bilingual Localization for Pillars of Eternity (EN and ZH)

Summary

This is not a corporate postmortem. It’s a player diary with a developer’s toolbox. I didn’t start this project because someone assigned me a localization task. I started because I love Pillars of Eternity, and because my relationship with language, gaming, and English is more complicated than it looks. Why language has always been the obstacle I’m not a native English speaker. In work, that’s fine — technical English, documentation, code reviews, Slack messages. I handle those without much trouble. But CRPG writing is a different beast entirely. Pillars of Eternity is essentially a novel you play. Pages of companion dialogue, lore entries, quest descriptions, NPC monologues — all of it dense, literary, full of tone and subtext. Even for native speakers, it’s a lot. For me, reading it in English felt like wading through mud. I’d understand the words, but I’d miss the texture. I’d get the meaning but lose the mood. So I played in Chinese. Most of the time, the existing community localization served me well. The translation was solid. The game was enjoyable. But most of the time isn’t all the time. Every so often, I’d hit a line that felt slightly off. Not wrong enough to break gameplay, but just… tilted. A companion’s sarcasm reading as sincerity. A villain’s menace softened into politeness. An archaic flourish flattened into plain modern speech. Small things. But Pillars is a game where tone is gameplay — when a line slips, it pulls you out of the world. And in that slipping moment, you’re reminded: this text was written by someone else, adapted by someone else, and it’s showing. That feeling nagged at me. The bilingual idea: older than I thought The thought of a bilingual localization — keeping both English and Chinese visible in-game — wasn’t originally mine. In 2015, someone on the Obsidian forums posted exactly this idea: Bilingual Pillars of Eternity — Learn Languages While Playing. The concept was elegant: show both languages side by side so players could use ...