Destiny 2 supports a number of different languages. However, there is no option within the game to have spoken dialogue in one language but subtitles and menus in another. Players might want to do this for a variety of reasons, whether simply to change up dialogue they’ve heard hundreds of times or to help with learning a new language. Thankfully, there is a way to do just this, but only on PC.
A video by Gigz from a few years ago runs down the process. In Steam, right click on Destiny 2 and go to the Language tab. There, set the language to whatever you want the spoken dialogue to be in. You’ll have to wait for Steam to download and install the new audio files. From here, if you launch Destiny 2, the entire game will be in your selected language, including menus.
The trick is to then right-click Destiny 2 again, browse your local files, and head to the packages folder. From there, you need to find all of the relevant language files. In Gigz’s example, he’s changing the dialogue to Japanese, and the files are tagged with “jpn.” When we did it, we used Chinese, and the files were tagged “cs.” Search for the language indicator in the packages folder and copy everything you find. Then, paste them into a new folder in your Destiny 2 folder called “[language] backup.”
Head back to Steam and change the language in Destiny 2 back to English. Go into packages and search “audio en” and copy everything that comes up (you may have fewer files show up than Gigz does in his video). Paste those into an “English backup” folder in the Destiny 2 folder.
Now, head back into the first backup folder you made. You have to change the language tag to “en,” essentially tricking Destiny 2 into thinking it’s using English language voice files. You can change the files manually, but Gigz also provides a helpful Powershell process to change the filenames of multiple files at once in the video.
Once you’ve changed all of your language files, copy and paste them into packages and choose to replace all files in the destination. After that, when you launch Destiny 2 you should find that the menus and subtitles are in English while the spoken dialogue is in whatever language you chose.
Note that you’ll have to repeat this process whenever Destiny 2 updates, which is kind of annoying. And while it would be nice if Bungie added an official means of independently changing the language of voice lines and text, it’s cool to be able to do it at all.
