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Signs of Life

Community translations

Help other players enjoy Signs of Life in your language. You can contribute a few menu labels, a dialogue correction, or feedback without translating the whole game. The community repository accepts human-authored translations through GitHub in the browser; no programming or local Git install is needed.

Contributions to that repository are optional and unpaid. You must be at least 18. The studio may edit, combine, or decline what you send, and may use accepted text commercially in Signs of Life. Inclusion and credit are not guaranteed. The repository's human-only rule applies to submissions there; it does not govern independent translation mods, including machine-assisted packs. An accepted community translation may be tested as a mod without becoming an officially supported game language. The repository's free translation-mod permission lets you use its English reference to publish your own Signs of Life language pack if no one has to pay to obtain or use the pack. It does not let you reuse another contributor's translation without separate permission. The studio or a maintainer it authorizes in writing may publish a combined community pack. We aim to acknowledge contributors whose accepted work we use in a public list, with an option to decline public credit.

The project lives here:

SignsOfLife-CommunityLocalization

Read the Translation Contributor Terms before you send anything. Opening a pull request and signing the form is how you agree to those Terms.

What you are doing

English examples sit in english/Config/. Each language has a folder such as locales/es/ (Spanish) or locales/fr/ (French). Those folders are ordinary locale packs: they overlay English text. Anything you leave empty stays English in-game.

You change player-facing words. You leave identifiers alone: ID, ItemID, SaveName, keys like item.ammo, and tokens such as {0}, [lightkey], or @AGIS@.

{
  "ID": "item.ammo",
  "Text": "Ammo"
}

An empty language file may contain only [], so there may be no text in it to edit yet. Open english/Config/UILocalization.json in a second browser tab, copy one English entry, and put it between the square brackets in your language's locales/<code>/Config/UILocalization.json:

[
  {
    "ID": "item.ammo",
    "Text": "<your own human translation of Ammo>"
  }
]

The angle-bracket text is only an instructional placeholder. Replace it with your own wording before you submit. Keep "item.ammo", the ID and Text field names, quotes, braces, and any tokens such as {0} or [lightkey] in other entries. Change only the player-facing Text.

To add a second entry, put a comma after the first closing brace, but not after the last one:

[
  {
    "ID": "item.ammo",
    "Text": "<your own human translation of Ammo>"
  },
  {
    "ID": "item.none",
    "Text": "<your own human translation of None>"
  }
]

Replace both placeholders before submitting. Preview your edit on GitHub to check the JSON structure. The repository's checks also validate it; command line tools are optional for this browser-only path.

Do not copy the entire english/ folder into a locale folder. Missing entries already use English in the game; copy only individual entries you translate.

Rules that will get a submission rejected

  • Machine translation or generative AI (DeepL, Google Translate, ChatGPT, and similar). Ordinary spelling and grammar checkers are fine.
  • Text copied from unofficial patches, other games, websites, subtitle files, or other third-party sources.
  • Submitting someone else's translation under your name.
  • Being under 18.

GitHub in the browser

You do not need Git on your computer.

  1. Create a GitHub account if you do not have one.
  2. Open the localization repository.
  3. Click Fork, then create the fork under your account.
  4. In your fork, open locales/, pick your language, then Config/, then a file (start with UILocalization.json if you are unsure).
  5. Open the file and click the pencil (Edit this file). If it contains [], use the first-entry example above, with the English reference open in another tab.
  6. Replace the instructional placeholder with your own translation and preview the change. Commit to a new branch in your fork (GitHub offers this when you save).
  7. GitHub will offer Contribute / Open pull request. Use that. It points at the studio repository.
  8. Fill in the template: language, a short summary, third-party sources (None unless you have permission to name one), and the checkboxes.
  9. Wait for a CLA Assistant comment. Open that link, sign in with GitHub, and confirm you are 18 and that you did not use machine translation or generative AI. Every person who authored a commit on the pull request must sign, not only the person who opened it.

You choose what and how much to translate. There are no quotas or deadlines.

Voice and markup details are in the repository's TRANSLATING.md. The full submit rules are in CONTRIBUTING.md.

Try a pack in the game

Each locales/<code>/ folder is a mod pack.

  1. Copy that folder into Documents/My Games/Signs of Life/Mods.
  2. In Mods, enable it. If it remains Pending, use Load Now or restart. A Loaded pack is already active.
  3. Enable only one locale pack at a time. The last loaded overlay wins.

After changing an installed locale pack, copy the updated files and restart the game. Copying files changes the disk copy; Load Now cannot reload an already Loaded pack.

Accepted work, if used, is expected to ship as community or Steam Workshop locale packs unless the studio later ships an official language separately.