How I added English to my solo-dev Unity MMO without touching 130 UI files

My game, Battle of Pirates, is a free online pirate MMO for Windows. The game features real-time naval PvP, fleets, fortress sieges, and boss events. Initially, all strings in the game were hardcoded in Turkish. As I started attracting international players on platforms like itch.io and IndieDB, the game began showing up in search results for players looking for an online "korsan oyunu," or pirate game.

The challenge was that there were 1,700 unique UI strings across 130 C# files, plus hundreds of server messages sent from Node.js. The thought of changing these hardcoded strings in every file seemed daunting and risky to the live game. The solution was to translate the text after it was set but before it was displayed. A single MonoBehaviour, running late in the LateUpdate, would check each Text component and translate its string if it had changed.

This approach translated the text at display time, so the server did not need any modifications. Input fields were skipped to avoid translating player typing. When switching back to Turkish, the original string was restored. The translation process also handled trailing spaces by copying the leading and trailing spaces from the dictionary file.

After implementing this system, I added an English language toggle on the login screen. The English update was released through the game's own launcher as a regular patch. While not a full localization pipeline, this method allowed me to add English to my solo-developed MMO without any risky refactoring. The Battle of Pirates game is free to play on battleofpirates.com and the Microsoft Store.