“Translate” Is the Wrong Word

The last file left the puzzle language-free — it ports across six languages for nothing. Everything around it does not, and the studio's first instinct was the obvious one: ask a model to translate the strings. It failed the same day it was first tried, in two different ways at once.

Wall one: right-to-left

Hebrew reads right-to-left, and a game is not a paragraph — it's a laid-out interface with a puzzle inside it. Flip the direction and things break that a translator never touches. The sharpest example is also a fairness bug: a code you read left-to-right — 4, 3, 2, 1 — reverses under right-to-left layout, and now the player is entering the answer backwards through no fault of their own. The fix isn't a word; it's a rule enforced in the engine:

css/* engine/stage.css — a code the player reads in order must NEVER mirror */
.display, .pad, .choicekeys { direction: ltr; }

There's a whole family of these — physical left/right CSS that doesn't flip, cube geometry that paints half a room, a call-to-action arrow pointing the wrong way. The worst one is invisible in testing: Hebrew inside an SVG <text> element renders reversed on iOS — but not in the headless browser the studio tests with, so the automated check passes and a real phone shows gibberish. The studio learned to keep Hebrew out of SVG text entirely, and to end every localization with a human looking at every room, in that language, on a real screen. The gates are blind to this; only eyes catch it.

Wall two: not all text is the same text

The deeper failure was subtler, and it's the one that makes "translate" the wrong verb. A room's text isn't one thing — it's many, and they don't want the same treatment. A line of framing fiction wants to be re-written to sound native, idioms and all. A play-instruction wants to survive exactly — plain, unambiguous, no cleverness. A pun that carries a puzzle's flavour can't be translated at all; it has to be re-invented in the new language, or dropped. Run every string through one flat "translate to Hebrew" pass and you get what the record calls it, in a native speaker's own words: "the Hebrew is very bad — literal, word-by-word." That grade is what turned the whole thing around.

What replaced it

So the studio stopped translating and started re-authoring — rebuilding each game natively in each language, from a taxonomy of text types that each carry their own rule (some survive exactly, some get rewritten free). And because you can't trust a model to grade its own native voice, the result runs a two-part gate: a script that checks the mechanical things — every key present, every placeholder intact, no forbidden too-bookish words — and then a blind native reader shown only the target text, never the English, asked one question: does a person actually talk like this?

"Translate" assumes the meaning is the payload and the words are just how it's delivered. For a game, the feel is the payload — and feel doesn't survive translation; it has to be built again, in each language, by someone who lives in it. The studio doesn't keep five translated games. It keeps one game, re-authored five more times, each proven by a reader who never saw where it came from.