Translations of Ultima IX
Ultima IX was translated to multiple languages. While Electronic Arts (EA) originally 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[edit]
The game was fully translated by Electronic Arts to German, including all in-game voices (including the cutscenes).
Unlike for Ultima VIII, this time EA used professional voice actors to do the translation of the spoken dialogue. The result is of a much better quality than the original English voices, which were not professionals. This was pointed out by reviewers, who added that the months needed for patching gave the studio enough time for the translation work.
However, the quality of the voice acting stands in contrast to the contents of the text itself. The translators were clearly not familiar with the Ultima-series, and thus ignorant about many meanings of series-specific terms or already established translations. Due to this, the translation of the game suffers from several glaring weaknesses, some are listed below.
- Numerous item and person names were translated differently from Ultima VII, creating noticeable inconsistencies between the games.
- The translators did not translate several names, or used a mixture of English and German (eg. they used "Schattenlords", while "Schattenfürsten" would have been better). This is especially noticeable in "old-fashioned" surroundings like Britannia.
- The prose, especially in the manuals, was of a very low quality, though the pathos in the English manuals was not much better.
- Ultima IX introduction in German (YouTube)
German journal
German in-game text
Translation Patch[edit]
Due to the fact that only the English version of the game is sold digitally, Sir John created the patch Ultima IX auf Deutsch, which uses the text, speech and video files from the original German CDs to patch an English version of the game into a German one. With version 3.0 of the patch all German text adheres to the "new" current spelling rules as of 2004/2006 and some of the namings have been changed to match the other translations available. Also the "Monster-Strength" and "Economy-Alignment" fan patches can be applied optionally. A new installer using InnoSetup was created to assist the user with the installation of the patch.
The French Translation[edit]
The game was fully translated in French by Electronic Arts, including voice acting for all the dialogues and cutscenes of the game.
Unlike the voices for 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 displays some mistakes:
- It appears that the translators were not familiar with the Ultima series, which leads 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 do not always fit with text of the NPC to whom he is talking.
- In addition different translators were used to translate the in-game books and the dialogues, which leads to some inconsistency in terms of how some in-game items or lore elements are referenced depending on whether the player is looking at a book or hearing speech.
- Ultima IX introduction in French (YouTube)
Other Languages[edit]
A full Japanese translation was also released, which included documentation, in-game text, speech, and cinematic cutscenes translated into Japanese.
The languages where only the documentation was translated, but not the game, are: Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Thai, Dutch, Greek, Polish, Korean and Chinese.
The game has been fan translated in Italian by the U9 Project ITA