Civ1 DOS in French / version française

[fluyt]

Some time ago I googled out the French localization of Civ1 v474.05. Before that I'd known about only one localization of Civ1 into foreign language - Russian.

Maybe it'd be interesting for someone, though for me it was somewhat an essential need to play a French translated game for mastering the language.

The localization isn't entirely proper, some flaws are described below.

Spoiler :

Main menu for example.


A screen of the 'Earth Creation'. There you can see main faults of localization: some French diacrtics are misspelt.
The inscription says et á l'intèrieur d'une croûte terrestre friable (English: and deep inside the brittle crust).
The correct variant is et à l'intérieur d'une croûte terrestre friable. In French, Á is absent at all while É and È are messed up. All other diactrical marks are rendered right.


Choosing the difficulty level. And again instead of difficultè there should be difficulté.


As in the original game you can press Esc and you'll got the field to type your own name of your civilization. Note that in the localization a name appearing there is still English, not French. E.g. Americans instead of Américains.

By the means of changing a line keyboardlayout=auto in dosbox-0.[insert version].conf you can set up French, Belgian or Canadian French keyboard that allows you in turn to input all French letters (àâèêéëîôùûü) except ç and œ, and also some other letters that aren't present in French: áíóäöü. Although capital letters aren't allowed.

I've decided to name my subjects Néerlandais (Dutch).


Terrible bug: é in Néerlandais is omitted. The only way to avoid it is inputing e or è instead of é, though it's grammatically incorrect.


The top menu panel titles aren't translated, but items of them are.

Also you can see the omission of the final s in my civ's name. It's so because game treats these names as if they are English, e.g. Germans, Romans, and so on. But standard names if they aren't changed by a player such as Chinois (Chinese), Anglais (English) etc. are rendered fully.


It says Français sages découvrent le secret du Travail du bronze! (English: French wise men discover the secret of Bronze Working!)
It's in correct as in French adjectives of nationalities stand after a noun. So it'd be Sages Français découvrent...

So what's translated in this localization? Names of civilizations, cities, leaders, units, buildings, techs and other game stuff, as well as all civilopedia entries, advisors' pop-ups and game 'videos'. There're some faults concerning game type listed under the spoiler, but in whole it's a very good job.

 

[fluyt]

Some Civilopedia articles.

Spoiler :

Gunpowder tech.


Carriers.


Marsh terrain.

 

[darkpanda]

I am a french native myself, and I can tell you the French version of Civ 1 is definitely not the right game to learn French

Except the mistakes you identified above, the general sentence formulation very often sounds funny: articles are missing ('le' , 'la', 'les', 'des', etc.), many names are abbreviated (probably because of technical reasons, as French words and sentences are generally longer than their English counterparts) ...

Also, it seems the encoding of non-US-ASCII chars is unconventional from what can be found in SVE savegames or CIV.EXE... Is it as standard encoding or completely customized to Civ ?

 

[fluyt]

Also, it seems the encoding of non-US-ASCII chars is unconventional from what can be found in SVE savegames or CIV.EXE... Is it as standard encoding or completely customized to Civ ?

What you've said is Greek for me. I don't know.

 

[gps]

Before that I'd known about only one localization of Civ1 into foreign language - Russian.

There also was a German translation. But also not a great one for the same reasons (longer words / sentences, abbreviations, typos, etc.) as mentioned above for the French version. It must have been around that time that I decided to generally go for the original (English) version of games and forget about localizations. It's so annoying to play a great game ruined by a cheap and amteurish translation...

 

[fluyt]

There also was a German translation.

I've found a weird Let's Play, but it's for Amiga version.

Link to video.

I decided to generally go for the original (English)

And so did I, but a after a while I got satiated with it as I became acquainted with English Civ's terms and went over to French, playing official French Civ4BtS.

 

[gps]

... playing official French Civ4BtS.

Sorry for the off-topic: from the perspective of a french native speaker - is the Civ IV translation a good one?

 

[Theov]

All text in Civ1 is in the .txt files. You'd be learning the language most if you'd do the translating yourself.
It's really not that difficult to mess around with.

 

[wujinlong]

Last edited by wujinlong; 13-01-2013 at 09:05. Reason: piracy

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Last edited by wujinlong; Jan 13, 2013 at 09:06 AM. Reason: piracy


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