Development covered 24 Sep 2026 to 25 Sep 2026 (commit dates).
Myriad Immortal Sect ships in eleven languages. I write the English and the Simplified Chinese as originals, and the other nine are translated. For a long time my checks for those nine were mechanical: every key present, every placeholder intact, no English left behind. This window showed me how little those checks say about whether a player in Jakarta or Osaka is reading the same game.
The work came from native readers going screen by screen. Almost everything they found would have passed any automated test I could write.
A translation can be complete and out of date
The biggest category was staleness. A translation is written against an English line. Later the English changes, because a mechanic changed or a sentence was rewritten for clarity, and the translation stays exactly as it was. It is not missing, it keeps its placeholders, and it now says something the game no longer does.
I found these by asking a dumb question of the history: for which lines was the English edited after the translation was written? About two hundred interface lines per language came back. Native readers kept only the ones whose meaning had actually moved, and those were bad. Recipe hints sent players to trade "at the sect" instead of the General Store. Bidding still demanded a realm it no longer needs. The world boss still appeared "every full moon with shared rewards" where the English describes a contributor board. In the quest stories, several translations still said a rival was already dead in chapters where he is very much alive, and that your master begged for your Foundation Pill when the rewritten English says you earned it herb by herb.
That check now runs as a report. It lists candidates rather than defects, because many English edits are punctuation, but it is the only thing that can see this kind of drift at all. The only trace a stale translation leaves is time.
One name per thing, inside each language
The second category was terminology. Within a single language the same stat would appear under two or three names. The sect's Contribution was labelled with the word for Merit in seven languages. In Indonesian and Malay, Insight was one word in the skill tree and another in the top bar, and the top-bar word was also the word for Epiphany, a completely separate mechanic. Divine Sense had one name on the alchemy screen and another on the stats panel.
To a player that reads as two different resources. They go looking for the second one. Each language now has one name per term, anchored to its own catalogue, and the glossary of cultivation terms on the site is the English reference the others were aligned with.
Register drifted the same way. The Russian interface addressed the player with the informal "you" on the main screens and the formal one on 123 other gameplay lines, so a single toast could pair "press again" in one voice with "please wait and try again" in the other. Gameplay now uses one voice throughout, and the account and forum screens keep the formal one on purpose.
Borrowed glyphs and borrowed punctuation
Some languages had inherited marks from the Chinese they were drafted from. Six Japanese strings used a simplified Chinese character where Japanese writes a different form. Two Korean descriptions carried bare Chinese characters with no gloss. And the Korean, Vietnamese and Thai text kept the Chinese full-width double dash and six-dot ellipsis in 720 strings, where those languages use their own punctuation. Korean keeps its own ellipsis, which happens to look similar and is native there.
Traditional Chinese had a related problem from the other direction. It is generated from Simplified Chinese character by character, which converts glyphs but leaves Mainland vocabulary alone, so players in Taiwan read Mainland words for server, account and login. Eighty-seven lines now use local vocabulary and are pinned so the next regeneration keeps them.
Names in templates
Quest text uses slots for the cast: your sect, your master, your rival. Only English and Chinese had names authored for those slots, so every other language fell back to English. A Japanese quest card read in Japanese except for "Azure Cloud Sect" sitting in the middle, under a header that already named the sect in Japanese. Slots now read each language's own codex names, the same ones the map and codex show. The English page for the sect of the azure clouds shows the form that used to leak into every other language.
What I would tell another small team
Automated checks tell you a translation exists. Only time tells you whether it is current, and only a native reader tells you whether it is consistent. Track when each source line last changed, and when it changes, treat its translations as suspects rather than as done.
Pick your language in the settings and look for yourself: the game is free in the browser in all eleven.
