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Localisation, costed and ranked.

Word count times rate times languages, sorted by how much market each one buys. Most studios localise in the wrong order and find out eighteen months later.

Word count

Menus, buttons, tooltips, error strings. Short strings, high context cost.
Description, features, what-is-new. Steam localises the page separately from the build.
Dialogue, item text, tutorials, quest copy. Usually the bulk of the bill.
0%
Fuzzy matches and repeated strings your vendor will not charge full rate for.

Billable words per language: —

Rates & overheads

Someone playing the build in that language and filing the string bugs. Skipping this is how you ship a German menu that overflows.
Font coverage, string externalisation, pluralisation, right-to-left, text fitting. Paid once, no matter how many languages follow.

Languages in scope

Share and rate are both editable. Rows are sorted by market share bought per dollar spent.

In Language Share % USD/word Cost Cum. cost Cum. reach

Coverage against spend

Languages added in the recommended order. The knee in the curve is where the next language stops paying for itself.

Caveats

  • The share table is approximate. Steam figures are eyeballed from the 2025 hardware and software survey language breakdown, rounded, and they move every month. The casual mobile table is a rough global blend, not a survey. Overwrite both with your own analytics the moment you have any.
  • Language share is not revenue share. Simplified Chinese is a quarter of Steam accounts and nothing like a quarter of Western indie revenue. Russian and Turkish carry high player counts at low regional prices. Japanese is the reverse.
  • Rates are mid-market vendor rates for 2025 and assume a normal turnaround, a glossary and no rush fee. Agencies quote 20–40% over these; direct freelancers come in under. Minimum charges bite hard on small UI-only jobs.
  • Machine translation plus a human pass lands around 40–60% of these numbers, and is fine for UI, dangerous for humour and fatal for anything a reviewer will quote.
  • Ongoing costs are not modelled: every update re-opens every language. Budget roughly 10–15% of the initial cost per major content patch.