Just downloaded this to try for the first time, and when I get it installed and get in game it's all in German. Am I misreading that it has been translated?

First thing when you click on setup exe file is choosing setup language which then determines game language automatically so just go back to install exe and choose english instead of german. Usually the exe should do that by itself when it detects an english version of Windows.

btw. Alpha6 will come with a largely improved english translation. A lot of menus and explanations/descriptions were not really that well-translated in Alpha 5.1 unfortunately, you might want to download it from the other thread in "Screenshots, Informations & Plans" subforums and extract zip file to ..\bote\data\strings\ folder and overwrite existing file.