A game feed in thirteen languages
Batata launched its interface in thirteen languages: English, Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, Latin American Spanish, Indonesian, Malay, French, Turkish, Hindi, German, Japanese, Korean and Thai. The website, the store listings and the legal pages followed. The games did not, on purpose.
The interface, not the games
Everything around a game follows the reader: the feed, the comments, the leaderboards, the settings, the sign-in, the emails and the push notifications. The game itself keeps its own words and its own direction. A game is never mirrored for Arabic, because a game that was designed left to right breaks when flipped; instead the chrome around it swaps sides and tells the game how much room it has on each edge.
A title is data
A game's title is the one piece of a game that is localized, and only when it is a word rather than a name. Each title carries its versions in every language and a ruling on whether it should be translated at all. The player sees the title in their language where one exists, English where it does not, and the maker's own title where the ruling says a name is a name.
Right to left
Arabic is read right to left, so the whole interface turns: the action rail, the chips, the sheets, the direction of a swipe that means next. Numbers stay Western digits, as the product rule says, and anything a person typed is isolated so that a Latin handle inside an Arabic sentence reads in its own direction. The website does the same, down to the direction of the hard shadow under every sticker.
Written natively
Nothing player-facing is translated word for word. Each market has its own lines, written from a locale pack that says how people there actually talk. The store header line is a good example: in English it is Swipe, Play, Brag; in Arabic it is a question, Bored? Play something; in Japanese the last word is slang for showing off. Same brand, native words, and the only thing that travels unchanged is the name, which means potato almost everywhere it goes.