RingWorld

Created: September 3, 2025
Last updated: September 22, 2025
Author: Jeremy Gao

Localization and internationalization madness.

This article is a work in progress.

1. RingWorld?

Rim means the edge of a subject, and a ring is a circular and hollow object. In some year, before RimWorld's released its initial Chinese translations, a group of translator from 3DMgames translated RimWorld into Simplified Chinese. In their translation, they made a mistake, and translated the title of the game – the most important piece of text – to "RingWorld", and started a chain of unbelievable misunderstandings that still deeply affect the game community until today.

2. Being Affected

The translators from 3DMgames shaped the initial Chinese player community. Their mistake was never entirely corrected. Even I almost thought that a rim is a ring. Their legacy can still be seen on online video sites like bilibili, general discussion sites like Baidu Tieba, and countless discussion groups on QQ, the Line of China.

Like many other players, I accepted the "RingWorld" translation – almost because at the time I started playing I didn't see any other viable title translations. A game may stay alive for ten years, some maybe thirty, yet most of them will be forgotten very soon. RimWorld is no exception.

3. Sticking To the Default Language

Despite the fact that my native speak is Mandarin [1], I've set most of my services and devices' displaying language to English[2]. I have three reasons for doing so:

  • Terminologies are (usually) easier to understand.[3]
  • Most pieces of software, at their initial design phase, did not consider non-latin text layout, or they've considered that, but did a poor job on it. I am picky on text layouts, and Chinese is not a latin language[4]. Putting Chinese text in a latin-oriented user interface that does not follow Chinese typesetting rules is completely intolerable.
  • Similar to the previous problem, translations with variable text may also break Chinese grammar rules[5]. Even if they don't break the grammar, the translation may still be a result of machine translation, unreviewed AI translation, or from a careless translator[6].

4. The Modern Translator Platform

Many developers may heard of Crowdin, and just like its name, its a crowdsourced site that helps translating applications.

5. Why Concat?

There are plenty of translation frameworks out their, and Tynan chose the worst one – manually injecting definitions and doing concatenation at source code level. Each piece of

  1. The written language is Chinese, and the spoken language is Mandarin. When somebody tell you that they "speak Chinese", they are essentially telling you that they can speak "ink printed on a newspaper", although they usually don't mean that – 99% of the time they are trying to say that they know Mandarin. I wish I could learn more Wenzhounese, though. This is not a joke.

  2. Canadian English, of course.

  3. Ref.: Shandong Club-ness (robustness) . This does not stand for "鲁智深提着狼牙棒" or "Koreans in Shandong"

  4. That is only valid if you are not a Romanized Chinese educand from the 1940s. I just cannot understand the idea at all – look at Vietnam, and look how their language has changed after the French colonized the country.

  5. If you don't know Chinese already, here is an example in English: try to put eat, grow, inspect in I did apple <placeholder>ed.. A translator may argue that they can move the placeholder, but in more cases the entire string the result of string concatenating, which is a part of the main program, and cannot be modified unless reverse engineered (English is subject-verb-object, this example is subject-object-verb).

  6. ref: I mistranslated some string of a game once and some angry players got pissed off of my translation.