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Localization using spreadsheets

Spreadsheets are one of the most common formats for localizing games. In Godot, spreadsheets are supported through the CSV format. This guide explains how to work with CSVs.

The CSV files must be saved with UTF-8 encoding without a byte order mark.

Warning

By default, Microsoft Excel will always save CSV files with ANSI encoding rather than UTF-8. There is no built-in way to do this, but there are workarounds as described here.

We recommend using LibreOffice or Google Sheets instead.

Formatting

CSV files must be formatted as follows:

keys	<lang1>	<lang2>	<langN>
KEY1	string	string	string
KEY2	string	string	string
KEYN	string	string	string

The "lang" tags must represent a language, which must be one of the valid locales supported by the engine, or they must start with an underscore (_), which means the related column is served as comment and won't be imported. The "KEY" tags must be unique and represent a string universally (they are usually in uppercase, to differentiate from other strings). These keys will be replaced at runtime by the matching translated string. Note that the case is important, "KEY1" and "Key1" will be different keys. The top-left cell is ignored and can be left empty or having any content. Here's an example:

keys	en	es	ja
GREET	Hello, friend!	Hola, amigo!	こんにちは
ASK	How are you?	Cómo está?	元気ですか
BYE	Goodbye	Adiós	さようなら
QUOTE	"Hello" said the man.	"Hola" dijo el hombre.	「こんにちは」男は言いました

The same example is shown below as a comma-separated plain text file, which should be the result of editing the above in a spreadsheet. When editing the plain text version, be sure to enclose with double quotes any message that contains commas, line breaks or double quotes, so that commas are not parsed as delimiters, line breaks don't create new entries and double quotes are not parsed as enclosing characters. Be sure to escape any double quotes a message may contain by preceding them with another double quote. Alternatively, you can select another delimiter than comma in the import options.

keys,en,es,ja
GREET,"Hello, friend!","Hola, amigo!",こんにちは
ASK,How are you?,Cómo está?,元気ですか
BYE,Goodbye,Adiós,さようなら
QUOTE,"""Hello"" said the man.","""Hola"" dijo el hombre.",「こんにちは」男は言いました

CSV importer

Godot will treat CSV files as translations by default. It will import them and generate one or more compressed translation resource files next to it.

Importing will also add the translation to the list of translations to load when the game runs, specified in project.godot (or the project settings). Godot allows loading and removing translations at runtime as well.

Select the .csv file and access the Import dock to define import options. You can toggle the compression of the imported translations, and select the delimiter to use when parsing the CSV file.

Be sure to click Reimport after any change to these options.