How were the Civ 4 voice files made?

Pavel Chichikov · Dec 5, 2012

I'm certain this is been asked before, just going to ask this here because I know this forum.
Obviously things like French and English selection sounds were easy, but what about sound files like Sumerian, Babylonian, Celtic (which one), Egyptian ect.?
Are most of them just gibberish, or did they get a linguist historian to come in and tell them how to pronounce some "native American"?

I've had this question for a while, I'm curious if anyone knows.

ImNotHere · Dec 6, 2012

I've wondered that too. I mean, it would be pretty hard to find someone to speak Sumerian or Babylonian or Ancient Egyptian. I assume that indeed, someone did come in to teach the devs how to pronounce words. In all realism, the sound probably isn't accurate to what it would sound like IRL.

Hightower · Dec 6, 2012

Pavel Chichikov said:
I'm certain this is been asked before, just going to ask this here because I know this forum.
Obviously things like French and English selection sounds were easy, but what about sound files like Sumerian, Babylonian, Celtic (which one), Egyptian ect.?
Are most of them just gibberish, or did they get a linguist historian to come in and tell them how to pronounce some "native American"?

I've had this question for a while, I'm curious if anyone knows.

The ancient Egyptian voiceovers are at least mostly correct. I studied ancient Egyptian briefly in college and can piece together what they're saying. We know how to pronounce ancient Egyptian, pretty much, with the only questions being about certain words that omit vowels (as all Semitic languages do in their writing to some extent, though ancient Egyptian is only sometimes considered a Semitic language).

The Celts' voiceovers are modern Irish Gaelic, not exactly historical but still accurate. No idea on the other obscure ones.

Swarbs · Dec 6, 2012

From what I've read, the more obscure languages are read by individuals who speak descendent languages, and have basically been translated as well as possible. For example Dido of Carthage is voiced by an Israeli woman speaking an interpretation of the Phoenician language.

I doubt they consulted linguistic experts on all of them, and I think only some of them had some linguistic support. As Hightower points out, he can understand the Egyptian voiceovers based on some college study, so I think it would be relatively easy to give a PhD student some money to come up with an understandable and historical translation, even if it's not entirely linguistically accurate.

But some of them are pretty poor - the Russian one for example stresses the words in completely the wrong way, and is quite obviously an English person reading from a script rather than anyone with any decent knowledge of Russian. And I think I read somewhere that the Persian one simply speaks a variation of Arabic, rather than any attempt to talk in Aramaic.

Hightower · Dec 6, 2012

Swarbs said:
From what I've read, the more obscure languages are read by individuals who speak descendent languages, and have basically been translated as well as possible. For example Dido of Carthage is voiced by an Israeli woman speaking an interpretation of the Phoenician language.

I doubt they consulted linguistic experts on all of them, and I think only some of them had some linguistic support. As Hightower points out, he can understand the Egyptian voiceovers based on some college study, so I think it would be relatively easy to give a PhD student some money to come up with an understandable and historical translation, even if it's not entirely linguistically accurate.

But some of them are pretty poor - the Russian one for example stresses the words in completely the wrong way, and is quite obviously an English person reading from a script rather than anyone with any decent knowledge of Russian. And I think I read somewhere that the Persian one simply speaks a variation of Arabic, rather than any attempt to talk in Aramaic.

I think the issue with the Persian one is that they speak modern Persian rather than Old or Middle Persian even though the Persian civilization is clearly supposed to represent ancient Persia and not Islamic Persia. (And Modern Persian is significantly different and strongly influenced by Arabic.) But I may be incorrect on that front. That's not really any worse than the Celts speaking modern Irish Gaelic, though.

Swarbs · Dec 6, 2012

Hightower said:
I think the issue with the Persian one is that they speak modern Persian rather than Old or Middle Persian even though the Persian civilization is clearly supposed to represent ancient Persia and not Islamic Persia. (And Modern Persian is significantly different and strongly influenced by Arabic.) But I may be incorrect on that front. That's not really any worse than the Celts speaking modern Irish Gaelic, though.

I think that's the issue in general - they have only made an effort when they needed to. So with something like French it was probably quite easy to find a French speaker, whereas with Russian they may not have found a native speaker and thus just got an English person to read a script from Google Translate. Likewise it's easier to find Farsi than Old Persian, and Gaelic rather than Celtic.

I suppose it's fair enough tho' - most people won't care if the speeches are linguistically accurate or not, and there's no point spending time and effort on voice acting when there are more important aspects of the game. Whether those aspects got enough time and effort is another question of course...

How were the Civ 4 voice files made?

Pavel Chichikov

King

ImNotHere

Warlord

Hightower

Prince

Swarbs

Emperor

Hightower

Prince

Swarbs

Emperor

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