This has been mentioned in https://itch.io/t/656577/templates-theme-page briefly but I’d like to make a proper thread for it.
This is part of site localization and should be done in coordination with the ongoing site text localization, except this is on creator’s side.
Currently, only one version of the page description can be made. To write it in other languages, you need to rewrite the same information in a different language below, which looks like this: https://komehara.itch.io/trap-runner (EN + JP)
It’s fine for short descriptions, but when the get longer the user has to scroll to read text in the language they want.
By letting the creator edit the list of languages used for description, and a description text field for each language (would probably be some dedicated class “Localized Text” that just appears as multiple fields in the editor), the creator can prepare multiple versions of the description.
Then on visitor side, we can display the description in one language at once:
- first pick the preferred display language that user can set in Preferences (maybe not the same as interface language as some people prefer e.g. keeping navigation text in English but long text in their native language). It could be a list of languages ordered by preferences too, since many games won’t have your 3 favorite languages but some may have one or the other. Ex: French > German. If French is available, it is shown. Else, if German is available, it is shown. Else, a warning “no favorite language supported in description, defaulting to language X” is shown and it shows the first language X added to the page (which may be English, or something else).
- still add a dropdown to let user pick another language if they want to, without having to go back to their language settings
This could also be applied to devlog posts and other content, although description is the more important (some devs may not localize each of their posts because it takes time and money, while still localizing page description).
Note that this is about page presentation only. Game language is another issue. For that one, you’d use the usual meta-tags, search filters, and possibly a Steam-style warning “game not available in your language” (this is actually more important than the warning for page content not available in your favorite languages, which is already obvious). Of course we’d encourage developers to write page content in languages A, B, C if game is available in A, B, C. But other threads can tackle the issue of exposing game languages to the visitor.