FORTNITE is the video game everyone is raving about. It makes use of both team-based survival shooter mode and a last-man-standing battle royale. Imagine Minecraft combined with the Walking Dead. First released in 2017 under the Unreal Engine umbrella of Epic Games, Fortnite is available on Microsoft Windows, MacOS, Playstation 4 and Xbox One.
As of this writing, the game is played by 250 million players, male and female alike. There are more registered players of Fortnite than inhabitants of Japan and Russian together. It has sold millions of copies and its fifth season launch saw the web traffic rise to as high as 37Tbps (terabits per second) which is five times that of the 2016 American presidential election. Drake, Antoine Griezmann, Chance the Rapper and Travis Scott all play Fortnite.
With all these milestones and achievements, it only makes sense that the game is appealing to numerous people from different countries and time zones. Imagine being interested in the game and being unable to play it because it is only available in only one language. The game developers realize its wide appeal and so they have made the game available for players of different background speaking a plethora of languages. Translation of games into other languages – also called localization – is a very old practice beginning with the translation of PAC-MAN in 1980 when the game was introduced to American audiences. As of March 2019, Fortnite players have access to 12 different languages. These languages are English, German, French, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Turkey, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil) and Spanish (Latin America).
Of course, Americans play Fortnite the most, but the fact that the game was translated to the above languages also means that there is a sizable amount of players from this country that Fortnite cannot risk alienating.
French is a no-brainer as a choice of an alternate language for the game as a majority of its players are from France. Although the game also has players from Saudi Arabia, Denmark etc. there are no translations available for these languages.
A great amount of Fornite players are from Korea.
A great number of Germans also play Fortnite as it is 4th on the list of countries with high Fortnite players, with Poland being 8th and Turkey 14th. Russian is 11th on the list of top countries with Fortnite players.
To change your language in Fortnite, you just have to follow these easy steps:
Go to your lobby, select three ellipsis at the top right corner, this will expand into a series of icons. Then select the gear icon hat represents settings. After selecting the gear icon, it switches to another screen. In this new screen, you see languages and matchmaking region under it. You choose your preferred language and click confirm. Of course, the default language of Fortnite is English, and so you require a decent level of understanding of English to be able to get to the stage where you change your language.
