While the browser Twine editor changes the language based on the default language set on your browser, the main twinery.org website doesn’t. The Twine reference and cookbook, hosted on Twinery, don’t have any option to change the display language, and both the reference and cookbook seem to be English only. Also, the Twinery website and Twine browser editor, including the reference and cookbook, doesn’t have an option to select which language you want to view the website in.
This is probably an issue for the Github repo more than a post here, but I feel like this, along with the nonoverlapping ecosystems as a whole, would be a contributing factor to the dominance of English in what is considered the IF community.
IFDB is English-only too, and I bet that will take years to change if it does change. Though I would be very happy if this bet was proven wrong.
Hilariously, there’s a video on Bilibili (Chinese Youtube) that teaches people how to use Twine (50 thousand views), but since the language detection for the browser Twine editor doesn’t work in the video, the Twine shown in the video is in English. At least half the video is the uploader telling people what various English terms mean and what various buttons do. I don’t think it’s great if people are forced to use an interface in a foreign language.
I managed to find a Twine guide in Chinese, also, but it was last updated 2 years ago.
I’m curious if there are non-English sites for Twine documentation that I’m missing, and if anyone has a list somewhere. On the other hand, this post is English, so I don’t know how many non-native English speakers will find it. Maybe I should put translations in every popular world language in the title.
Edit: I discovered that the person who made the tutorial is actually Binggang Zhuo, who submitted two English-language games to IFComp 2024 and 2025 and has a Github account and Github site. The Github site hosts Simplified Chinese versions of his two IFComp entries (Big Fish and Dead Sea). Based on his Github account, he’s a Chinese PhD student at Tottori University, Japan, studying natural language processing (NLP). He has eleven thousand followers on Bilibili and uploads near-daily vlogs. I don’t know if he’ll see this, but if he does, hi.