Lord Lakely
Idea Fountain
It's the same with the word for "Emperor" - Tzar (or Car in Serbian) is just a corruption of "caesar", like it is in German and Dutch.
Civilization 7 Leaders Dialogue Translations
- Thread starter Guandao
- Start date
Guandao
Rajah of Minyue and Langkasuka
To any Arabic speakers on this forum, is Ibn Battuta speaking Arabic? And which dialect?
Lord Lakely
Idea Fountain
@Andrew Johnson [FXS] I assume given that Ibn Battuta was from the Maghreb, he speaks either Arabic or Tamazight?
![Andrew Johnson [FXS]](https://civfanatics-data.community.forum/avatars/m/326/326908.jpg?1589646534){kind=avatar}
Andrew Johnson [FXS]
Firaxian
- Joined
- May 15, 2020
- Messages
- 538
Medieval Arabic!
TyrannusRex
Warlord
I'm curious, for leaders you need to speak languages like Classical Latin, Medieval Arabic, or especially things like Akkadian, does Firaxis try to find people classically trained in these languages or maybe find speakers of modern descendant/relative languages and give them some pointers in the recording booth as to how to speak it?
I know in the case of Latin, Ancient Greek, Old English, Old Norse and the like, there are plenty of people well-trained and fluent in these languages, basically as a job, who'd love to contribute to a popular piece of media to ensure accuracy and get more people interested.
I know in the case of Latin, Ancient Greek, Old English, Old Norse and the like, there are plenty of people well-trained and fluent in these languages, basically as a job, who'd love to contribute to a popular piece of media to ensure accuracy and get more people interested.
Hellenism Salesman
King
Having scoured these past threads, the Fandom wiki, and watched videos by the YouTube channel polymathy (a polyglot specializing in Classical Latin and forms of Ancient Greek), the answer tends to be that Firaxis gets modern speakers of descendant languages and writes their dialogue phonetically.
This has some benefits: the Classical Latin spoken by Trajan in Civ VI has the voice actor’s beautiful Italian accent. Contrast this with the non-Italian academic who voices Augustus in Civ V- his accent is inauthentic and it comes off (at least to me) as someone timidly speaking in a class instead of living the language and the character.
In certain cases, Firaxis will also choose relatively famous actors in their home regions to voice characters, such as with Joao III and Lady Six Sky in Civ VI. This is another benefit of the approach: Portuguese or Mexican Civ fans get to hear voices they recognize in a Civ game!
But it also has some drawbacks. When you’re writing things phonetically, you have to be very careful about how you do it. Choose the wrong letter and you get little mistakes like Trajan pronouncing “iovis” as “Lovis” because a capital “i” resembles an “L.”
Unfortunately, it also results in some gross mispronunciations when the actors aren’t coached properly. Lady Six Sky’s dialogue is littered with soft “sh” sounds, transcribed with a Roman “x.” The voice actress instead pronounces them as harsh, violent “ks” sounds, because she was never told what that letter meant.
While you could argue that was a fault of bad transcription (write the sound as “sh” and the actress might understand), proper transcription still can’t save bad pronunciation. Take Pericles in Civ VI, for example. His dialogue is faithfully translated and acted beautifully by a modern Greek, but it is full of missing sounds and anachronisms all because the actors wasn’t taught how to do it right (watch Polymathy’s video on the subject for more).
In the worst of cases, you have leaders like Caesar from VI completely butchering Classical Latin with an Ecclesiastical pronunciation and Italian anachronisms because the staff left him high and dry.
A lot of these problems could be avoided if they found qualified academics who don’t need coaching (and could even write dialogue for them!). In fact, the man behind Polymathy regularly says how he would love to do so! The only problem is the sometimes middling performances, as mentioned above. But if you’re going to try and revive these languages at all, you ought to do it right. It’s easier to direct a qualified speaker of a language than it is to force a non-native speaker to unlearn everything they know.
We’ll see how Civ VII fares in this field, what approach it chooses to take, and if it proves me wrong. Whatever the case, I hope this helped
This has some benefits: the Classical Latin spoken by Trajan in Civ VI has the voice actor’s beautiful Italian accent. Contrast this with the non-Italian academic who voices Augustus in Civ V- his accent is inauthentic and it comes off (at least to me) as someone timidly speaking in a class instead of living the language and the character.
In certain cases, Firaxis will also choose relatively famous actors in their home regions to voice characters, such as with Joao III and Lady Six Sky in Civ VI. This is another benefit of the approach: Portuguese or Mexican Civ fans get to hear voices they recognize in a Civ game!
But it also has some drawbacks. When you’re writing things phonetically, you have to be very careful about how you do it. Choose the wrong letter and you get little mistakes like Trajan pronouncing “iovis” as “Lovis” because a capital “i” resembles an “L.”
Unfortunately, it also results in some gross mispronunciations when the actors aren’t coached properly. Lady Six Sky’s dialogue is littered with soft “sh” sounds, transcribed with a Roman “x.” The voice actress instead pronounces them as harsh, violent “ks” sounds, because she was never told what that letter meant.
While you could argue that was a fault of bad transcription (write the sound as “sh” and the actress might understand), proper transcription still can’t save bad pronunciation. Take Pericles in Civ VI, for example. His dialogue is faithfully translated and acted beautifully by a modern Greek, but it is full of missing sounds and anachronisms all because the actors wasn’t taught how to do it right (watch Polymathy’s video on the subject for more).
In the worst of cases, you have leaders like Caesar from VI completely butchering Classical Latin with an Ecclesiastical pronunciation and Italian anachronisms because the staff left him high and dry.
A lot of these problems could be avoided if they found qualified academics who don’t need coaching (and could even write dialogue for them!). In fact, the man behind Polymathy regularly says how he would love to do so! The only problem is the sometimes middling performances, as mentioned above. But if you’re going to try and revive these languages at all, you ought to do it right. It’s easier to direct a qualified speaker of a language than it is to force a non-native speaker to unlearn everything they know.
We’ll see how Civ VII fares in this field, what approach it chooses to take, and if it proves me wrong. Whatever the case, I hope this helped
TyrannusRex
Warlord
Yep, precisely! I've seen Luke's videos, which I love, but it also made me want to shout his point from the rooftops -- there are people willing to help with this!Having scoured these past threads, the Fandom wiki, and watched videos by the YouTube channel polymathy (a polyglot specializing in Classical Latin and forms of Ancient Greek), the answer tends to be that Firaxis gets modern speakers of descendant languages and writes their dialogue phonetically.
This has some benefits: the Classical Latin spoken by Trajan in Civ VI has the voice actor’s beautiful Italian accent. Contrast this with the non-Italian academic who voices Augustus in Civ V- his accent is inauthentic and it comes off (at least to me) as someone timidly speaking in a class instead of living the language and the character.
In certain cases, Firaxis will also choose relatively famous actors in their home regions to voice characters, such as with Joao III and Lady Six Sky in Civ VI. This is another benefit of the approach: Portuguese or Mexican Civ fans get to hear voices they recognize in a Civ game!
But it also has some drawbacks. When you’re writing things phonetically, you have to be very careful about how you do it. Choose the wrong letter and you get little mistakes like Trajan pronouncing “iovis” as “Lovis” because a capital “i” resembles an “L.”
Unfortunately, it also results in some gross mispronunciations when the actors aren’t coached properly. Lady Six Sky’s dialogue is littered with soft “sh” sounds, transcribed with a Roman “x.” The voice actress instead pronounces them as harsh, violent “ks” sounds, because she was never told what that letter meant.
While you could argue that was a fault of bad transcription (write the sound as “sh” and the actress might understand), proper transcription still can’t save bad pronunciation. Take Pericles in Civ VI, for example. His dialogue is faithfully translated and acted beautifully by a modern Greek, but it is full of missing sounds and anachronisms all because the actors wasn’t taught how to do it right (watch Polymathy’s video on the subject for more).
In the worst of cases, you have leaders like Caesar from VI completely butchering Classical Latin with an Ecclesiastical pronunciation and Italian anachronisms because the staff left him high and dry.
A lot of these problems could be avoided if they found qualified academics who don’t need coaching (and could even write dialogue for them!). In fact, the man behind Polymathy regularly says how he would love to do so! The only problem is the sometimes middling performances, as mentioned above. But if you’re going to try and revive these languages at all, you ought to do it right. It’s easier to direct a qualified speaker of a language than it is to force a non-native speaker to unlearn everything they know.
We’ll see how Civ VII fares in this field, what approach it chooses to take, and if it proves me wrong. Whatever the case, I hope this helped
I wasn't aware about Joao and LSS (though I'd heard Philip's VA at least got news coverage when he took the role), but it's cool that they try to reach out to people like that at least sometimes. Dean Dillon, who's evidently already done some voice work, voicing Tecumseh is a good example of this.
That said, I know getting a PhD's help can cost a pretty penny, but I hope they get more scholars and native speakers on board where possible. Cause, like... Montezuma's Nahuatl needed work (fun fact, though, the VA dubbed the Mexican Spanish version of Anakin Skywalker in RotS). Don't even get me started on poor Vitali's Chuvash.
Hellenism Salesman
King
And see, now we’re teaching each other! That tidbit about Philip is new to me.
Please note that this was all hearsay on my part- I heard about Joao’s VA from the ever-reliable source of “YouTube comment.” With LSS the “relatively” in “relatively famous” is doing some heavy lifting. She’s important enough to voice characters in My Little Pony (I’m not kidding) but maybe not a national celebrity. Any Mexicans are welcome to correct me on this!
As for the cost of professional help, I’d like to imagine Firaxis’s missteps in the past have made academics desperate to help!
I can hear them screaming now: “Please, I’ll do it for free, I’ll do anything! Just don’t butcher my pet interest in front of the world!”On that note, I know of a certain grudge-bearing eager fanatic with just the Levantine credentials Firaxis might need… oh @Zaarin!
Though most of the Akkadian VAs have been Mexican, interestingly. A lot of them have not been great, but Civ6 Hammurabi's VA did a beautiful job.
If I'm not mistaken, she's Tara Strong's official Mexican Spanish dub, not just in MLP. But my source is the same as yours: YouTube comments.
I'm here! I will write all the Phoenician dialogue! I will write books of it! I will give IPA pronunciation guides! I...will recommend hiring a Georgian VA because its phonology is probably actually the closest.On that note, I know of a certain grudge-bearing eager fanatic with just the Levantine credentials Firaxis might need… oh @Zaarin!
On which note, I can write it out in Georgian, too.
Guandao
Rajah of Minyue and Langkasuka
I suspect a lot of Civs won't get leaders because of the difficulties in recording dialogue for them.
stealth_nsk
Deity
It's hard to imagine what kind of difficulties those should be. So far, Civ games had recordings in a lot of dead ancient languages.
I think this opens the door for civs that simply don't have options for leaders or whose languages are unattested/undeciphered (Minoa, for example), but yeah, Civ6 proved very resourceful in its depiction of extinct languages (or in finding the next best thing, like Tomyris speaking Ossetian). It didn't always hit the mark, but the effort put in is certainly commendable. (Except Phoenician. That one's unforgivable.
Also I totally get what Andrew is talking about with audience expectations, but I die a little inside every time Elizabeth I sounds like a posh 20th century Londoner.)
Guandao
Rajah of Minyue and Langkasuka
I rather not have Minoans in the game, personally, due to the lack of knowledge about them. Same goes for Harappans. It would be weird for them both to exist in the same era as Greece and Mauryan India.
I think Firaxis would struggle with finding people who can do actual Sumerian, Elamite, Urartian, Hurrian, Hittite dialogues. Also extinct South American languages like Muisca and Mochica. I do think their budget is probably smaller this time.
I'm kinda annoyed Mandarin is used for very ancient Chinese leaders. Like my parents' native tongues (Min Chinese) are apparently the most divergent out of the Chinese languages. Maybe those or Cantonese would be even closer to the actual Old/Middle Chinese?
Phoenician was a Kartvelian language?
I think Firaxis would struggle with finding people who can do actual Sumerian, Elamite, Urartian, Hurrian, Hittite dialogues. Also extinct South American languages like Muisca and Mochica. I do think their budget is probably smaller this time.
I'm kinda annoyed Mandarin is used for very ancient Chinese leaders. Like my parents' native tongues (Min Chinese) are apparently the most divergent out of the Chinese languages. Maybe those or Cantonese would be even closer to the actual Old/Middle Chinese?
Phoenician was a Kartvelian language?
I think we know enough about the Minoans to make a civ about them; like the Mississippians, they're on the liminal edge between historical and proto-historical. (I'd consider the Harappans pre-historical, by contrast; everything we know about them comes from archaeology--save for a few references in Sumerian documents that might refer to them.)
If they can find an expert in Akkadian, they can find an expert in Sumerian--they're usually the same people. I'm not sure how available specialists in the other languages are. There are plenty of Hittite scholars, but whether they have time/willingness to work on a video game is another matter...
Given the success of Civ6 and what we've seen so far, I'm sure they have the largest budget they've ever had.
Old and Middle Chinese weren't tonal so no modern Sinitic language would sound even close. I think this goes back to what Andrew Johnson talked about player expectations: players expect the Chinese leader to speak a tonal language.
Georgian's phonotactics are very different from Phoenician's, but it has the right sounds except vowel length and pharyngeal fricatives--most importantly a three-way contrast among voiced, aspirated unvoiced, and ejective unvoiced obstruents.Phoenician was a Kartvelian language?
Andrew Johnson [FXS]
Firaxian
- Joined
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- Messages
- 538
Just a reminder that leaders and civs are separate! Having a Minoan or Harappan Civ wouldn’t mean we’d have to figure out a language for them!
Only Old Chinese was atonal. Middle Chinese started with 3 tones, then doubled to 6 after it lost voicing distinctions.
Having Confucius speaking in Old Chinese would be impossible to do reasonably (we really don't have the info to be able to properly pronounce a single sentence in OC) but him doing Early/Late Middle Chinese would be well within realm of reason.
As to why that wasn't chosen, I would guess that's where the expectations come in. We've seen the only other game which tried Middle Chinese got the same sort of reaction out of the Chinese audience as Classical Latin and Ancient Greek do in Italy and Greece, respectively. "I can't tell what they're saying, ergo the company fudged up the VA work and couldn't even tell." Add to that the common misconceptions like Cantonese being Middle Chinese and you end up creating a situation that requires a very good community management team for China not to blow up in your face. So it genuinely could have been a matter of project producer not giving them an okay for it, price-return value being stacked against them. Even if that decision means that any pre-Ming leader is likely automatically disqualified from the game going forward as you'd have the likes of, say, Wang Anshi speaking in an ancient tongue side-by-side with goddamn Confucius blabbering in standard modern Mandarin, creating quite a hefty dissonance.
Lord Lakely
Idea Fountain
Or invent a leader for those Civs :cries in Ariadne:
Türkiye is doing a very good job at putting information and sources about the Hittites online, and translating them into English. There is significantly more online information now, about both their culture and language, than there was five years ago. I'm pretty sure it'll take very little effort to find a Turkish scholar on the Hittites willing to collaborate for both the Civ and the language for the leader.
TyrannusRex
Warlord
So, does anyone happen to know the origin of Franklin's little snippet of a quote we hear in his trailer? "Strategy is not idle amusement..."
Assuming it's not just something that was created.
Assuming it's not just something that was created.
Andrew Johnson [FXS]
Firaxian
- Joined
- May 15, 2020
- Messages
- 538
Adapted from Franklin writing on chess. "Chess" here has been changed to "a game of strategy".
