Translations of Ultima VII
Ultima VII was the first Ultima with several official translations produced by Origin in the western world – some earlier games were translated to Japanese, but not this one. Note that the only translation of the Forge of Virtue expansion is in Spanish.
The German Translation[edit]
The game was fully translated by Origin to German.
The translation work was done in England, but this is not 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 accidentally translated as "Erpel", which is wrong, since that means "mallard"; which in English is also called “drake”.
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 their triggers and were useless.
- Due to a bit of missing code, reagents which can only occur once (and are not bought) had a quantity of "0" instead of "1", thus they could not be used and vanished when trying to stack them.
- The line spacing is much wider, 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 speaking about some other topics first, and shops are outright crippled, since the items further down in the list cannot be bought.
- Even if fixing the line spacing, the engine only can handle 5 lines of dialogue options, everything after does not work. Since German words in general are longer, it resulted in shops with six or seven lines of items, which of course could not be bought.
- The Black Gate German introduction (YouTube)
- Black Gate German quotes (YouTube)
German title screen
German introduction
German in-game text
Die Gemeinschaft
Fan Patch[edit]
Ultima VII auf Deutsch is a fan-patch created by Sir John, due to his dissatisfaction about weaknesses in the official translation, the fact that Forge of Virtue was never translated and that the translation is next to impossible to find nowadays due to having been released on floppy disks 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 replaced with newly recorded ones with a better voice. The patch can be applied to a CD-version of Ultima VII in order to get the ultimate German version of Ultima VII. Additionally, all the bugs mentioned above – together with bugs of the original version – are fixed as well.
The French Translation[edit]
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.
Additionally, like with the German translation, for some reason the line spacing was widened, thus severely crippling shops in the same way the German translation did.
- Ultima VII: La Porte Noire (YouTube) – French translation
French title screen
French introduction
French in-game text
The Spanish Translation[edit]
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 was not translated, but all the Spanish game magazines talked about it as La Puerta Negra.
Alas, contrary to the German and French translation, this one did not bother to prepare the game for any common diacritics. So there are no accented letters in the Spanish translation. On the other hand, the line spacing was not altered, thus shops, unlike in the German and French translations, still work properly.
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.
- Bienvenidos a Trinsic – Let’s play en español (YouTube)
- Ultima VII The Black Gate (YouTube) – Spanish version
Spanish title screen
Spanish in-game text
Other Languages[edit]
Other languages where only the documentation had been translated are Polish, Korean and Chinese (in Taiwan). The Polish Book of Fellowship is called Bractwo.
Despite all other games having been translated to Japanese, neither Ultima VII nor Ultima VII Part Two were. Even the documentation was not translated until the Ultima Collection. Why that was done with the best part of the series is unknown.
Fan Translations[edit]
- Italian translation
- Ultima 7: Black Gate Expansion – 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.