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In early 2018, Fun Bits was contracted to add support for a large list of languages to a few of its demos and tutorial applications. The main one I worked on of these was the Touch Basics (or Touch NUX) application, which was what would run upon first setup of the Oculus Touch controllers.

This was a little bit of a challenge, as the project had been built on, at the time, a pretty old version of UE4, which predated many later features for both localization and font support in VR. Additionally, we were adding over 20 new languages, so getting an efficient pipeline to get the newly localized content into the game and tested was vital.

I built several tools for this project, mostly in Python, to optimize this flow. Translated data had to be checked for invalid characters, signs of incorrect translations, and missing keys. The data had to be quickly brought into the engine without stomping any data we didn’t want it to. We also had to isolate all characters used by all text to make sure it would be properly included in the displayed font for all languages.

By the end of this project, we had a pretty polished process - the tools I had been working on allowed us to reliably handle the data we recieved from the localization team and to quickly identify any errors at several steps in the pipeline.