Sep 2, 2025
As an experiment, I've machine-translated the help docs in Lua Carousel into 7 languages:
  • Spanish (Peninsular and Latin American)
  • German
  • French
  • Japanese
  • Chinese
  • Portuguese
A help page in Lua Carousel translated to Neutral Latin American Spanish. A help page in Lua Carousel translated to German.
A help page in Lua Carousel translated to French. A help page in Lua Carousel translated to modern Japanese.
A help page in Lua Carousel translated to French. A help page in Lua Carousel translated to modern Japanese.

Hopefully it is helpful for someone to no longer have to put up with English.

I put each language in a separate download to reduce the amount of data you need to download.

Other languages are machine-translated from the English version. I've had friends spot-check it for obvious issues, but there are likely to be problems I missed. Please report any issues you spot. If you want to manually translate pages to improve wording and tone for your culture, contributions would be most welcome.

No support yet for right-to-left languages, or languages with combining characters. Lua Carousel still assumes every character on screen is atomic. For example, I can support Chinese and Japanese but not Korean, Arabic or Indian languages.

I don't know what I'm doing when it comes to multilingual keyboard support. My rough sense is that that's something to configure for your device. But if there's something I can change in Lua Carousel to make your life easier, please let me know.

I've included different fonts for Chinese and Japanese, which blow up the download size for these languages. The source code inside each zip file download is exactly the same, only the font files are different. The larger font files also seem to take up to 10 seconds to load.

This post is part of my Freewheeling Apps Devlog.

Comments gratefully appreciated. Please send them to me by any method of your choice and I'll include them here.

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