Translation was an after-thought in GalCiv I. It was amazing it even worked as the fonts in GalCiv I were bitmapped. That means every character -- every letter -- was literally an individually encoded picture.
Translation to a non-indoEuropean dialect would have been out of the question. But this time, we used the True Type Engine that is part of DirectX 9c (this is actually the feature that breaks compatibility with really old Intel integrated graphics -- not the fancy 3D engine).
So we literally now have directories such as:
\galciv2\data\english
\galciv2\data\german
\galciv2\data\russian
and so forth.
But there's a lot to it. There's also the question on updating. We want to make it so that when you install the game, it will put your country code in the registry. And then when a player updates the game from Stardock Central, it'll download all the different language files (they're text and compressed so we're talking tiny) and then when you run the game you will have it in your own language.
The nice thing about Stardock Central is that it enables us to ship the game with zero copy protection. No CD in the drive required. No Internet access needed. While some people will still pirate it, we hope those numbers are low -- there's no excuse for it. The retail game is cheaper than any other AAA retail title that's come out recently. And there's no inconvenience factor. Just install it forget. And when you update it, you use the serial # with the game and it will auto-generate an account for you. So even if you get a new computer 3 years from now, lost your CDs, lost your serial #, no problem. Just use Stardock Central and type in your email address that you used (and if you lost/changed that too you can always contact us to retrieve that) and it'll set you up with a link to validate and voila download the latest/greatest version.
We think in the long-term, there's a good reason to keep the hassle down -- international sales. As countries that are currently piracy heavy start having more people who buy these games, the convenience of just being able to type in your UserID and password and be able to download the full game will be a big deal especially if you get any language you desire. It's a lot like iTunes except you can re-download your game as many times as you need.
In the meantime, Paradox is in charge of foreign translation. I am glad they're in Europe because once they see how much dialog there is to translate I think they'd want to reach over and whack us. There's hundreds of pages of dialog. I'll talk about that next.