I was nominally in charge of making Diablo 2 localizeable from the USA side but all I did was make all the text into resources loaded at run time that had some

I was nominally in charge of making Diablo 2 localizeable from the USA side but all I did was make all the text into resources loaded at run time that had some scrolling speed information embedded into so that scrolling text could match different spoken language speeds/text length for text that was more than one over head speech bubble in length. I handed off text data file to a parent company team in Ireland that translated it to all the European languages we supported. We could check the Spanish in house but had to trust them for every other language. I think we had contractors in the Far East do the Japanese/Chinese/Korean translations. The team in Ireland early on provided a function/sprintf format for possessive/of the/gender specific/other idioms that didn't translate well with just substitution so I merged that back into the source code/text data and didn't have to touch the source code after that for localization text resources and we released the game worldwide mostly simultaneously (I think we had a slight delay for Far East for some reason) in 2000. We just used Excel for most of the data driven parts of the game like Vagrant Story and the game could read a text csv file in debug mode and a binary excel file in production. I imagine most games that are something like this now.