Release Civ 4 in English in Australia

[Mongoloid Cow]

Yeah, we don't speak that American "English" down under. We have our colours and flavours, not colors and flavors. It's civilised, not civilized. etc. etc. The most annoying thing about American computer games is they never get simple language right. Don't make it so the first thing I do when I get Civ 4 is to release an English language mod

 

[Sub]

Does it really bother you that much?

 

[rhialto]

Quite frankly, yes.

 

[MarineCorps]

It's probaly easier just to release it in American English then it is to cahnge it to Australian english.

 

[homeyg]

Yeah, we don't speak that American "English" down under. We have our colours and flavours, not colors and flavors. It's civilised, not civilized. etc. etc. The most annoying thing about American computer games is they never get simple language right. Don't make it so the first thing I do when I get Civ 4 is to release an English language mod

Oh, come on! You're making it sound like you have to read Chinese to play it!

 

[Mongoloid Cow]

Do they translate it into British English or International Standard English? Either of them would be perfect in Australia. You do not know how annoying and irritating the way you Americans spell words are. A lot of the changes you've made don't even make sense.

 

[homeyg]

Do they translate it into British English or International Standard English? Either of them would be perfect in Australia. You do not know how annoying and irritating the way you Americans spell words are. A lot of the changes you've made don't even make sense.

Well I think it's annoying when I'm reading a book and 'color' is spelled 'colour'. Why the extra letter?

 

[Aussie_Lurker]

Well, Homeyg, given that the English version-colour-came first, I think the proper question to ask is: why did the Americans feel it neccessary to REMOVE a letter? Is it just to make it easier to spell when you HEAR the word (damned phonetics ). If so, then lets make things REALLY easy, and just call knights nights -or even NITES - from now on-how does that sound?

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

 

[toh6wy]

I think the "our" instead of "or" thing is kind of cool, but I don't really like "ise" instead of "ize." It makes it seem like a misspelling because I don't see it very often - and also, z is just a cool letter.

 

[Mongoloid Cow]

What I've always wanted to know is why the "u" was removed from "vapour", "flavour", "colour", "favour" and so forth, but not "hour".
Or why it goes from "inflex -> inflexion" in normal English to "inflex -> inflection" in American. And so forth. But that is going a bit OT.

I think the "our" instead of "or" thing is kind of cool, but I don't really like "ise" instead of "ize." It makes it seem like a misspelling because I don't see it very often - and also, z is just a cool letter.

You mispelt "mispelling", or at least you did in Australia

 

[Heat Miser]

I had to log in just to ut in my two cents worth. Truthfully, it's not that Americans changed the spelling of words or you Aussies, Canadians, etc. It's just that when the colonies were founded, there were no hard and fast rules on spelling. Thomas Jefferson (a very educated man for his day) spelled the same word three different ways in the Declaration of Independence. It is just that the time and distance factors allowed for divergence in spellings and pronunciations. And one cannot tell me that this is just an American phenomenom. Heck, my wife and I can't even agree on the correct pronunciation of the word "roof" (of course, she is from Mississippi).

 

[Corvex]

"Hukt on fonix werkt for mee!"

I sympathize(/ise) with your problem, and I too wish that they would release in standard, rather than American english

 

[rhialto]

Civ2 was released with a US English, French, and German translation in the same box. Making a UK English version in the same box would have been trivially easy. And despite the larger amount of text involved in civ3 and presumably civ4, I can't imagine adding a UK English version out of the box as a 'translation' would take more than half a day for one of the designers familiar with the texts that need 'translating'.

Really, there isn't any good reason they couldn't include both languages out of the box.

 

[GeneralX]

I think my objection to the spelling problem is that it seems that the Americans are trying for a cultural victory by removing the flavour of other nations and replacing it with colourless (colorless?) mass produced, plastic, sound-bite driven consumerism. But since Australia isn’t a playable civilization it’s the rest of you who need to worry. No wait a minute, I’m not playing C3C at the moment… Help, I’ve lost touch with reality…

 

[mikehunt]

if an australian or british game company released a game in the US with all the Us in place, I would not complain

just to piss you all off it's ZEE not zed

 

[MeteorPunch]

So would it be called Civilisation IV?

 

[Mongoloid Cow]

Being called "Civilization 4" would be alright since there are a whole heap of legal ramifications and so forth due to it being a trademark or whatever, just all the other spellings should be normalised in English for Australia.

 

[Lockesdonkey]

Do they translate it into British English or International Standard English? Either of them would be perfect in Australia. You do not know how annoying and irritating the way you Americans spell words are. A lot of the changes you've made don't even make sense.

You don't know how irritating it is to read British English with all those extraneous letters. There are more speakers of American English is the single largest "superdialect", if you will, of the English language.

 

[Rohili]

So would it be called Civilisation IV?

That didn't sound right at all.

That said, I use british english, and I do prefer "colour" instead of "color". However I don't really like using "s" instead of "z", probably because I pronounce words like "civilization" with the "z" sound.

 

[rhialto]

You don't know how irritating it is to read British English with all those extraneous letters. There are more speakers of American English is the single largest "superdialect", if you will, of the English language.

If you are going to take the sheer numbers approach, there are actually far more speakers of English who consider the UK spellings to be the standard ones. Think "world's largest democracy" for the answer.

I can't honestly see why the installer can't ship with both, and ask which language you want at install time. That way, depending on disk space, they could even include other languages in the same distribution disk.