Civilization 7 Leaders Dialogue Translations

[TyrannusRex]

Sorry - you’ll have to wait for the release!



just one, but it’s comprehensive


We really try for this, or at least to get as close as we can. There are always unexpected hurdles - some languages are just lost in time so we have to go with what we can best fit. At times, really ancient dialects can even sound rude or offensive to modern day speakers (IIRC Ramkhamhaeng uses the pronoun กู, which is overly familiar/rude to modern ears), or simply unexpected - we are used to historical dramas where people speak with upper class modern British accents, have good hair and teeth, and no pox scars.

But we did get a professional translator - usually an academic and an expert on that particular person - for each of these leaders. I can’t always evaluate it myself - I am not going to have the ears for church Latin versus “real” Latin, and I always double checked my assumptions with the scholar.

There’s always a chance that something slips through - if the script comes back and we’re assured it’s correct, we double check it, and later people notice anachronisms - that could happen! But we did some due diligence here.



So I wrote both these leaders that you see here (and ones you’ve yet to see), and I ALSO wrote the Leader Pass leaders. So that’s kind of the feel. More playful than, say, the quotes, but still trying to be accurate as much as we can.

I really do appreciate the effort that goes into these voiced leaders, though I do wonder how some things slip through even with, for instance, a language as well-attested as Latin -- In VI, Trajan has a couple grammatical errors, and Caesar... I can't look past his pronunciation. There are plenty of Latin scholars more than worth their salt out there to check and recheck this stuff.
(Related note: Luke Ranieri/ScorpioMartianus is practically begging to be involved in a video game! He'd love to go over stuff with writers and/or actors, I'm sure. Jackson Crawford probably would, too.)

That said, the vocal work is always a treat for me to hear. Even if I'd heard it before, like so, so many hours of Civ VI, I always look forward to hearing it again.

 

[TyrannusRex]

Thanks!

Re: the language - I’d be interested if a magahi speaker found it incorrect; this could be an anachronism in the translation. We double checked the translations with multiple scholars and speaker, but I don’t have the skills to do this myself.

Re: sinner - my intent here was to capture the emotional weight of the Kalinga war upon Ashoka. “I have done something deeply wrong.” Pāpa, in Pali. “Sinner” is shot through with Christian connotations, but was the best way imo to get that “I have changed my ways and have a new path forward” across to a mostly non-Buddhist audience in one word.

It’s always a balancing act: convey a sense of personality to those who do not know the figure while being as accurate as we can to those who do.

You've piqued my curiosity -- if I may ask with all due respect, what the hell happened with Harald Hardrada? A Catholic king (genuinely so, from what we can tell) rambling on about Valhalla and Odin while founding Protestantism in-game? What?? I love Hardrada, but if you wanted a pagan Norwegian king, Fairhair is right there.

 

[Eagle Pursuit]

You've piqued my curiosity -- if I may ask with all due respect, what the hell happened with Harald Hardrada? A Catholic king (genuinely so, from what we can tell) rambling on about Valhalla and Odin while founding Protestantism in-game? What?? I love Hardrada, but if you wanted a pagan Norwegian king, Fairhair is right there.

Andrew wasn't with Firaxis when Civ 6 base game was released.

 

[Andrew Johnson [FXS]]

Andrew wasn't with Firaxis when Civ 6 base game was released.

Correct. I came on with New Frontiers Pass and was fully present with Leader Pass and Civ7. So I honestly don’t know about Harald and Trajan.

I can hazard a guess re: Harald, though. Harald is representing Norway here - Norway, across all eras: Viking, Catholic, Lutheran, etc. Of the religions in-game, I'm not sure what would fit better than Protestantism - certainly one associates Lutheranism with Scandinavia more than Catholicism or Orthodoxy. About the lines... again, I'm not sure. These would have been written perhaps 10 years ago, and I was living in Singapore teaching anthropology at the time, only interacting with Civ as a fan!

In 7, the leader is representing themselves, not this milennias-long streak of history, so that should be easier to pin down.

But on the larger question of languages, maybe there's a kind of weighted list that we can write:
Accuracy (Most important. Complication, is it possible to reproduce? If we have only snippets, can these be stitched together to make something versatile enough to be usable in-game? Let's say the original language is unusable in this way. What do we do? Go for a usable one that is nonetheless several centuries younger? Go for a "historical drama" voice?)
Availability (Important Complication: so this language exists. Can we find the right people to translate? Do they have time? Complication to the complication: can we get a second pair of eyes to double-check?)
Expectations (Middling importance e.g. is this what people want? Note: we will usually err on the side of accuracy. Let's imagine a historical figure spoke in a way that was highly offensive to modern speakers - we'd please a few, offend many [here I can't come up with English language examples, but it's the case with some other languages]. How do we reconcile this?)
Performance (We can keep iterating if we have to. There is no right answer to the following questions: Is the best speaker the best actor? Do we go with a native speaker or a good actor? For "dead" or ancient versions of modern languages, how important is it to find someone with heritage from that place?)

There are some fantastic performances in Civ7 that I can't wait for you to hear (Gwendoline Christie is one of them, of course. No, I won't say anything about the others). I know that sounds like marketing hype, but I'm genuinely excited. Each performance has been through a few pairs of knowledgeable ears - from the scholar, to the recording studio, to whoever in the office (if anyone) can understand it. Of course, we're better at listening to, say, Napoleon or Franklin than Hatshepsut or [REDACTED] at this.

 

[Solver]

Andrew, can you share anything about Hatshepsut's process? So she speaks a later form of Egyptian, and I assume you didn't go with the Egyptological pronunciation, as that exists for convenience and doesn't even try to be close to the real one. But it's a difficult language to reconstruct phonetically and, as far as I know, our best attempts use backward reconstruction from Coptic and contemporary Akkadian transliteration of known words, so Egyptian phonology is quite speculative. Egyptian also apparently had quite an inventory of fricatives, with sounds like /ʕ/ or /ħ/ not being very common in modern languages. So what decisions did you have to make about reproducing Egyptian well, and did you maybe end up getting a performer who's used Coptic?

 

[Guandao]

I really do appreciate the effort that goes into these voiced leaders, though I do wonder how some things slip through even with, for instance, a language as well-attested as Latin -- In VI, Trajan has a couple grammatical errors, and Caesar... I can't look past his pronunciation. There are plenty of Latin scholars more than worth their salt out there to check and recheck this stuff.
(Related note: Luke Ranieri/ScorpioMartianus is practically begging to be involved in a video game! He'd love to go over stuff with writers and/or actors, I'm sure. Jackson Crawford probably would, too.)

That said, the vocal work is always a treat for me to hear. Even if I'd heard it before, like so, so many hours of Civ VI, I always look forward to hearing it again.

It's strange since Classical Latin should be easy to reconstruct. I think Augustus' dialogue back in Civ5 only had one pronunciation error (Romae), a testament to the voice actor (Emile Khordoc)'s knowledge of Latin. Julius Caesar's ecclesiastical pronunciation in Civ6 stunned me.

You've piqued my curiosity -- if I may ask with all due respect, what the hell happened with Harald Hardrada? A Catholic king (genuinely so, from what we can tell) rambling on about Valhalla and Odin while founding Protestantism in-game? What?? I love Hardrada, but if you wanted a pagan Norwegian king, Fairhair is right there.

We also had Harald Bluetooth mentioning the pagan Norse gods back in Civ5, when he was the first Danish king to be baptized a Christian. I think Firaxis thought Norse gods were "cool" at the time. They wanted to emphasize them in the dialogue of the "Viking" leaders.

 

[Andrew Johnson [FXS]]

Solver - I’ve got to err a little on the side of NDA, but perhaps I can say that for Hatshepsut we had quite a long process. Our recording studio brought a scholar in who did a translation and rewrote the script phoenetically. Our actress was Egyptian - not that that helps at all with language, but it seemed the right call. It was a long back-and-forth to find a good fit and a good translation, a little longer than other languages. I don't envy you the process. We've since changed it to have much more back-and-forth with the scholar.

 

[Dale]

Solver - I’ve got to err a little on the side of NDA, but perhaps I can say that for Hatshepsut we had quite a long process. Our recording studio brought a scholar in who did a translation and rewrote the script phoenetically. Our actress was Egyptian - not that that helps at all, but it seemed the right call. It was a long back-and-forth to find a good fit and a good translation, a little longer than other languages. I don't envy you the process. We've since changed it to have much more back-and-forth with the scholar.

Being the one who worked on Old World's Pharaohs of the Nile DLC, I understand totally where you are coming from here. Let's just say, including 18th Dynasty Kemetan translations and hieroglyphics for various in game objects, is not a decision I would ever make again.
But in the end, I had a lot of fun learning about the language.

 

[Solver]

This is quite cool - one aspect I really like of Civ becoming a high-budget mass media product is that the devs now have the opportunity to do things like consulting scholars on ancient languages, in addition to having two history PhDs on the team. A great contrast from the 90s games (the level being "what do we on the team remember from history courses?") or the Civ4 era ("we have several people who studied some history").

Let's just say, including 18th Dynasty Kemetan translations and hieroglyphics for various in game objects, is not a decision I would ever make again.

And I'm glad you did, so I can brag about being one of a few programmers to have added hieroglyphic text support to an actual game

 

[Guandao]

@Andrew Johnson [FXS] I assume Trung Trac is speaking in modern Vietnamese?

 

[Andrew Johnson [FXS]]

Historically, she should be speaking Lac. We tried very hard to track down some reconstruction of Lac, but it really has been lost to time here. So there’s no good option.

Yes, it’s Vietnamese, I can check on the era.

 

[The_J]

I love this insider information .

@Guandao do we actually have so far much leaders talking?
I think besides with Ben Franklin and Napoleon we could run into figuring out what they are talking.

Although I assume that the guys at Firaxis have internally somewhere a spreadsheet with all the translations ^^.

 

[Zaarin]

Ben Franklin

I'll be pleased as Punch if he's speaking Colonial American English.

 

[Eagle Pursuit]

I'll be pleased as Punch if he's speaking Colonial American English.

Plot twist: as a Bostonian, he will have a thick Southie accent.

 

[Zaarin]

Plot twist: as a Bostonian, he will have a thick Southie accent.

Flashbacks to Civ5 Washington's Virginia accent...

 

[8housesofelixir]

Flashbacks to Civ5 Washington's Virginia accent...

It now occurs to me that FXS had correctly decided not to give Confucius a Shandong accent (in modern times, a thick Shandong accent is generally considered bumpkinly and vulgar).

 

[King William I]

Flashbacks to Civ5 Washington's Virginia accent...

That was supposed to be Virginian? I was getting Bill Clinton

 

[Zaarin]

That was supposed to be Virginian? I was getting Bill Clinton

"Broadly upper South," if you will (Bill Clinton is from Arkansas).

 

[TyrannusRex]

Ben Franklin: Yoa cousin, from Booohstaaahn.

 

[Guandao]

Historically, she should be speaking Lac. We tried very hard to track down some reconstruction of Lac, but it really has been lost to time here. So there’s no good option.

Yes, it’s Vietnamese, I can check on the era.

I tried searching for the Lac language on Wikipedia and got Lac Viet (aka Luoyue in Chinese). I assume they were Austro-Asiatic speakers? Maybe even proto-Vietic would be appropriate for Trung Trac to speak, but I don't expect reconstructed proto-languages to be used in a game like Civ7.

I love this insider information .

@Guandao do we actually have so far much leaders talking?
I think besides with Ben Franklin and Napoleon we could run into figuring out what they are talking.

Although I assume that the guys at Firaxis have internally somewhere a spreadsheet with all the translations ^^.

Not too much of them speaking, but a little bits of dialogue there and here. I'm trying to bump up this thread to prevent it from being buried.