Special characters in localization not working

I am trying to translate the text in my game to Spanish. I followed the tutorial on the Roblox Wiki. I generated and exported the GeneratedLocalizationTable.csv. Then I added the translations to Spanish using Excel. However, when I tried to import the file to Studio, it gave an error saying that the file can only be encoded in UTF-8. I re-exported the localization table file in UTF-8 format and tried again, and it worked. However, the special characters in Spanish were messed up and replaced with question marks and other symbols.

For example, in the csv file, I type “cámara” but when converted from ANSI to UTF-8, it is changed to “có­¡²a”, and in-game, it is displayed as “c?a”.

Does anyone know how to handle this problem?

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I’m not sure, but…

Internally, ANSI and UTF-8 represent every character as a number. The English characters are exactly the same in each, but non-English characters are completely different.

If you convert from ANSI to UTF-8, then you’re finding the appropriate UTF-8 numbers for the ANSI characters.

If you interpret ANSI as UTF-8 then you’re treating the ANSI numbers as UTF-8 numbers. This will produce wrong characters for non-English text.


It looks like maybe you wrote your translations as ANSI then interpreted them as UTF-8. I would suggest using UTF-8 from the very beginning instead of using ANSI.

Make sure when you open your CSV that you’re opening it as UTF-8 and not as ANSI. Make sure that when you save, you save it as UTF-8 and not ANSI.

What program are you using to edit or make your CSV files?


If none of these work then this is a Roblox bug, but I doubt that. Other developers have been using this system and I haven’t seen any bug reports about this issue, which I would expect if it was a Roblox bug instead of user error.

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I am using Excel to edit the CSV files.

You were right. I clicked “Convert to UTF-8” instead of “Encode in UTF-8” in Notepad++ and that fixed the problem.

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