Table of Contents
Symbols, Syntax, and Slots—Localizing Luck be a Landlord into Arabic
What’s Luck be a Landlord about?
Luck be a Landlord is a roguelike deckbuilder developed by the solo dev Dan DiIorio (TrampolineTales).
The player is tasked with braving the relentless cycle of capitalism by spinning a slot machine, with each spin potentially being their lifeline in the race against time to pay their ever-increasing rent.
Slot symbols act as your deck—more can be added with each spin, and each offers unique effects to help you get that bread.
The concept is very simple, and very addictive.
Luck be a Landlord has claimed an embarrassing amount of my free time long before we ever got to work on it. That turned out to be a blessing in disguise—it’s definitely not the kind of game you can translate “blind.”
Context is King
Variables and Formatting
Descriptions, which outline what each symbol, essence, or item does, are very variable-dense. Even having played the game, it’s almost impossible for a translator to avoid making comprehension errors without further LQA testing.
| Source | Translation |
|---|---|
Gives <icon_coin><color_FBF236><value_1><end> every <text_color_keyword><value_2><end> spins. Adjacent <group_robinlikes> and <last_robinlikes> give <icon_coin><color_FBF236><value_3><end> more. <text_color_keyword>Destroys<end> adjacent <group_robinhates> and <last_robinhates>. Gives <icon_coin><color_FBF236><value_4><end> for each <group_robinhates> and <last_robinhates> <text_color_keyword>destroyed<end>. | يعطي <icon_coin><color_FBF236><value_1><end> كل <text_color_keyword><value_2><end> من التدويرات. تعطي <group_robinlikes> و <last_robinlikes> المجاورة <icon_coin> زيادة عن المعتاد بمقدار <color_FBF236><value_3><end>. <text_color_keyword>يدمر ما يجاوره من <end><group_robinhates> و <last_robinhates>. يعطي <icon_coin><color_FBF236><value_4><end> مقابل كل <group_robinhates> و <last_robinhates> <text_color_keyword>يتدمر<end>. |
One significant bottleneck was the reuse of certain strings. Arabic is a highly gendered language, meaning gender neutrality is, unfortunately, not feasible in some cases. LBAL’s Arabic localization is one.
Fortunately, none of these strings address the player. They simply describe the symbol, essence, or item they refer to. So this was an easy compromise.
Passive forms, numbers, and grammatical cases for nominative and accusative can quickly become confusing, especially when icons are used instead of words with visible grammatical declensions.
We sidestepped the issue entirely by referring to the grammatical gender of the word “item” (male) and “group” (female), instead of the individual item’s gender.
This led to consistency across descriptions of various items with similar effects and far simpler sentences.
- Using the masculine form in the singular.
- Using the feminine form in the plural.
Character Limits
Arabic often faces expansion issues in translation, as it takes more character space on average than most Latin languages.
Typically, this is more or less manageable with careful editing and omitting unnecessary details—but that stops being an option when dealing with highly technical texts. LBAL falls into the highly technical category.
Thankfully, due to the generous character limits, sentence structure rarely ended up being the bottleneck. instead, the names of icons—symbols, items, and essences—posed the biggest challenge.
Following our top rule when dealing with technical texts, which is ensuring readability at a glance, posed a huge challenge when it came to some of these and required creative solutions to minimize character counts across the board without losing clarity.
| Icon | Source | Translation | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
 | Coin | الفلس | Where it would usually be translated into the commonly used “العملة”, it’s one character longer than the more colloquial “الفلس”, so we opted for the latter. |
 | Dame | الخاتون | A perfect but uncommonly used translation. “Khatun” was originally used for the spouses of Ottoman aristocracy, then evolved into an umbrella term for ladies of wealth in Arabic. |
RTL Implementation
Luck be a Landlord runs on Godot 3.x.x, which, unlike Godot 4.x.x and beyond, lacks support for right-to-left (RTL) languages out of the box.
Without built in Arabic support to fall back on then fill the gaps, we turned to our trusted partner, Eternal Dream Arabization, who handled alongside the developer the technical aspects of this localization.
This collaboration led to some exciting milestones for Arabic game localization, the biggest of which being Luck be a Landlord becoming the first game built in Godot 3 to be localized into Arabic!
Font Design
You may be surprised to learn that the above screenshots aren’t iterations or test versions; in fact, they are all fonts that LBAL’s Arabic localization supports!
Luck be a Landlord supports 3 font types by default:
- Pixel Font: The default font and the most suitable for the game’s aesthetic.
- Dyslexic Friendly Font: An alternative font meant to emphasize legibility above all.
- Generic Font: A third alternative for those who prefer a more standard font.
Eternal Dream Arabization handled font creation, modification, and implementation for these 3 distinct fonts.
Pixel Font
Designed with legibility in mind, the focus while designing the pixel font was preserving the original aesthetics.
Dyslexic Friendly Font
This font’s design focused on legibility above all else.
Generic Font
Plain and simple for those whom it strikes their fancy.
Outro
A huge thank you to Dan for trusting us with this gem, and to Eternal Dream Arabization, not only for knocking it out of the park with their eye for aesthetics, but also for achieving an RTL implementation that is on par with Godot’s official one.
(Keep an eye out for a part two exploring the technical and artistic challenges in more detail on Eternal Dream Arabization’s blog).
If you’d like to destroy your productivity or potentially experience radicalization in real life, Luck be a Landlord is available now in 20 languages on all the platforms you shouldn’t be gaming on:
Give it a shot!
