Is the English translation in Beyond the Dome actually good, or still machine-translated in places?

It's genuinely a proper, professionally produced localization for the 1.0 release — a real step up from the community fan-patches that were the only English option during years of Early Access — and multiple reviewers specifically called out the translation quality as solid for the genre.

That said, it isn't flawless. Reviewers writing right after the June 2026 launch flagged specific rough patches — one widely-noted example is an early character being addressed as "Foster Father" in every single line, an overly literal rendering of an honorific that doesn't read naturally in English. General notes about small translation mistakes that can be distracting also came up, and at least one review reported some deeper system text and DLC content still showing untranslated Chinese in launch week, though that's the kind of thing patches tend to clean up quickly, so check the current state on the Steam page rather than assume it's still true.

Bottom line: expect a real, mostly solid English translation with occasional awkward phrasing, rather than either a broken machine translation or a flawless AAA localization — reasonable for an indie team translating eight years of accumulated Chinese text for the first time.