Twitch Globalization: Translation Improvements

We’re committed to building a place where people from across the globe can come together to share their gaming experiences. You’ve probably heard of our ongoing effort to improve our global quality of service, and today we’re taking a different type of step towards improving the Twitch experience for our international audience.

English, do you speak it?

If you’re reading this blog, you have some familiarity with English. But Twitch has lots of visitors who don’t speak English, and it’s important for them to have a consistent experience. That experience starts with the language used for text such as the “Log In” button. Our process for choosing that language was inconsistent and confusing: clicking a link to es.twitch.tv/riotgames would switch your language to Spanish; different sections of Twitch used different logic to select a language; and certain pages were always rendered in English, no matter what.

Changes

The change you’re most likely to notice is that language subdomains are going away. Pages such as pt-br.twitch.tv or ru.twitch.tv/starladder1 will be no more, and navigating to one of these will redirect to the [www.twitch.tv](http://www.twitch.tv) equivalent. We’ll use a cookie to save your language preference, and everyone will see www.twitch.tv in their address bar despite getting the page in their preferred language. This allows us to use the same technology to power translations across the whole website, including our secure pages for logging in and purchasing subscriptions, which previously were English-only. The lack of subdomains also makes sharing links less disruptive, as your friends will view Twitch in their prefered language even if it’s different from yours.

Switching languages

When you visit Twitch, we’ll look at your browser’s configuration to give you a page that matches your preferred language. (In a post next week, we’ll cover the technical details surrounding these changes and explain all of the factors which determine your default language). We expect this will be a better experience for most people, but if you need to change your language, go to www.twitch.tv and scroll down to Language in the bottom right:

Next up

This is just step one towards a better international Twitch experience. We’re aware that translation coverage is incomplete for many languages, so we’re working on getting complete, professional translations for all of the text on Twitch. We’re also thinking about ways to promote content that’s more likely to be relevant to you: if you’re in Russia and browsing in Russian, you’re likely to be interested in broadcasters whose content is also in Russian. We encourage your feedback as we continue to improve our internationalization system, so let us know in the Comments if you have problems or suggestions.