Translations of Ultima IX

Ultima IX was translated in multiple languages. While Electronic Arts original planned for a global release before Christmas 1999, the buggy state of the game upon its US release made EA postpone the international until March 2000 so that the latest patch could be implemented.

The German translation
The game was fully translated by Electronic Arts to German, including all in-game voices.

The French translation
The game was fully translated in French by Electronic Arts, including voice acting for all the dialogues and cutscenes of the game.

Unlike Ultima VII and Ultima VIII, the voices were this time recorded by professional voice actors used to the task of dubbing videogames, animated series or even movies. For instance Raven was voiced by Céline Monsarrat who is the official dubbing voice of actress Julia Roberts. While the ensemble cast was smaller than in the original english version, the acting received a lot of praise amongst reviews in french magazines and websites.

The actual translation of the text however is more of a mixed bag, displaying some very obvious mistakes.

For starters, it appears that the translators were not familiar with the Ultima series, which lead to a fair bit of dialogue to be written as if "Avatar" was the character's name instead of his title.

The Avatar's dialogue also seems to have been translated out of context as his words don't always fit with text of the NPC he is talking too.

In addition different translators were used to translate the in-game books and the dialogues, which lead to some inconsistency in term of how some ingame items or lore elements are referenced depending on wether you are looking at a book or hearing speech.


 * Watch the Ultima IX intro in french

Other Languages
A Japanese translation was done which had the documentation and the in-game text translated, but not the speech.

The languages where only the documentation was translated, but not the game, are: Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Thai, Dutch, Greek and Polish.