Translations of Ultima VII

Ultima VII was the first game with several official translations done by Origin in the western world - Japan got translations of the earlier games, but strangely enough not of this one. Note that the expansion Forge of Virtue  has never been officially translated except for the Spanish translation.

The German translation


The game was fully translated by Origin to German.

The translation work was done in England, but this isn't apparent right away in the text itself, which is a relatively very well-done translation that even uses the German equivalent of Ultima's "old English". Only on closer look one does discover items and phrases that were translated incorrectly, mostly things that have multiple meanings, which someone who is no native speaker would have difficulties to see. Example: drakes were accidently translated as "Erpel", which is wrong, since that means "mallard"; the confusion clearly coming from the fact that "drake" can refer to both, a young dragon and a male duck.

The documentation was completely translated as well. The Book of Fellowship has the German title Die Gemeinschaft (since in English only "Fellowship" was the title). The title of the game itself was also translated to Die Schwarze Pforte and is seen on the game box.

The voice of the Guardian was done by no native German, and as no filters were applied, it sounds less intimidating than the original one. Also they had to remove some of the Guardian's laughter to fit everything on the disks (since German needs more text).

Sadly, the translation also introduced a number of bugs:


 * Several keywords were not correctly coded, thus they missed there triggers and were useless.
 * Due to a bit of missing code, single reagents in the world (not bought) had a quanity of "0" instad of "1", thus they couldn't be used and vanished when trying to stack them.
 * The line spacing is much bigger, thus causing only three lines of text instead of five being visible. Since that also goes for dialogue choices, many choices are not visible until later, and shops are outright crippled, since the later items can not be bought.
 * Even if fixing the line spacing, the engine only can handle 5 lines of dialogue options, everythign after doesn't work. Since German words in general are longer, it resulted in shops with six or seven lines of items, which of corse couldn't be bought.


 * Watch the German intro
 * The German credits quotes

Fan Patch
Ultima VII auf Deutsch is a fan-patch created by Sir John, due to weaknesses in the translation, the fact that Forge of Virtue never got translated and that the translation is next to impossible to find due to having been released on floppies only. It does take the existing German translation, corrects it heavily and adds a translation for Forge of Virtue. The German speech files of the Guardian are re-used. The patch can be applied to a CD-version of Ultima VII in order to get the ultimate German version of Uitlma VII. Additionally, all the bugs mentioned above are fixed as well.

More details are in the codex page for the project.



The French translation


The game was also fully translated to French by Origin, although the fully translated release only came out some months after a release of the original english version (albeit with a French manual). Multiple translators worked on the project but worked very carefully to keep consistency throughout the game. The entire dialogue and narrations were also translated to a form of "Old French" in order to stay true to the use of Britannian English in the original version.

The documentation was translated as well, and The Book of Fellowship has the French title La Confrerie (which means the same as "Fellowship"). The title of the game itself was also translated to La Porte Noir and is also seen on the game box.

The voice acting of the Guardian was done not by a voice actor, but by lead translator Jean-Marc Chemla. While the correct filter for a deep voice was applied, the echo effect was not added.


 * Watch the French intro



The Spanish translation
The game was also fully translated to Spanish, including the credits quotes and the documentation - the Book of Fellowship becomes Libro de la Hermandad. The floppy version was exactly as the others, map included, but the CD version was a budget one with all the documentation in PDF format. The title of the game wasn't translated, but all the Spanish game magazines talked about it as La Puerta Negra. Alas, contrary to the German and French translation, this one didn't bother to prepare the game for any common special characters. So there are no accented letters in the Spanish translation.

The voice of the Guardian in this translation was the most similar one to the English version. Additionally, this is the only of the original translations, which did include Forge of Virtue in a translated state; no other translation could boast with this.

Watch the Spanish game 

Other Languages


Other languages where only the documentation had been translated are Polish, Korean and Chinese (in Taiwan). The Polish Book of Fellowship is called Bractwo.

Interestingly, despite all other games getting a Japanese translation, the whole of Ultima VII did not (both parts). Not even the documentation got translated until the Ultima Collection. Why that was done with the best part of the series is unknown.

Fan Translations

 * Italian translation
 * Spanish translation
 * Finnish translation - very incomplete
 * Brazilian Portuguese translation - very incomplete
 * There is also a Russian translation, made by fans, of The Complete Ultima VII.