Exult Forum

Isn't there already a French translation of Serpent Isle, that Origin released?

I know there's a French translation of The Black Gate, cause I own a copy...

Finding a french version now would be a major bummer for Artaxerxes and his ream of translators (pun intended).
But really there is only a Spanish translation of SI. There seems to have been a some company that specialized in doing "odd" translations of Ultimas. (odd meaning that they are not well known of like the Spanish translation of BG and U8).

If there is a French SI it must have been sold really bad as there is no known copy anywhere!!!

There is no french translation of Serpent Isle. But.. some people are working on a translation and you could help them http://www.serpentisle.fr.st

and we are actually progressing well.

Only 80 usecode files are left to be translated. KK is a bit busy now so I do most of the work (and don't be fooled by the activity percentile on sf.net, it's wrong!).

To sum up what's up:
* 24h clock support
* french conversations (only 80 are still in English, out of 1200)
* french description (when you single-click on an item; coming from text.flx)
* french spellbook (finished)
* corrected spells (to be closer to what it should be, like AN HUR, instead of REL HUR)
* some names are "frenchisized". Moonshade is now known as Ombrelune, and the Magister as le recteur.

etc.

We need testers! If you speak french well, please d/l the patches, apply them and report problems! (spelling mistakes are many and need to be corrected badly).

Thx

Artaxerxes
SI-french team

Dominus: what is the name of this Group?

I am currently making an Ultima Collection and want to get my hands on that.

...
Don't you all realize you're talking about the same project?

Toad: if you are talking about the company that did the spanish official release then I have no clue about it. I only heard about them but never had my hand upon any of these.
And of course I meant SI-french, lead by Artaxerxes.

Artaxerxes: I don't think it is appropiate to tranylate the names of landmarks, cities and characters. But that is for you to decide...

It was indeed a difficult decision to take. After all, all the walkthrough use the english names and for that very reason it would make sense to keep them the way they are.

On the other hand, names carry a meaning which is lost in the translation. Not everyone knows that "Fawn" mean what it does unless you are fairly cultured. Certain name don't sound great either in Francais: Deadeye for instance is perfect for an english crowd but means nothing for a french one. We have thus agreed on changing it to "Le borgne", which incidentally sounds really realistic in french (meaning, you could find a movie where a bad pirate was called "Le borgne"). I agree we need to be careful and not go overboard, and that's why each change has been thoroughly discussed beforehand.

There is actually a poll on our sf web space to talk about it. You can find it there:
http://sourceforge.net/survey/survey.ph ... y_id=13473
The question is in French. Here is the translation:
Should we translate names of places, landmark, item (or at least part of it)?

You could also discuss about that very topic in the forum:
http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.php?forum_id=166916

Please note you need to be a registered member of sf, and please remember we need testers!

Thank you,
Artaxerxes

My opinion is that changing names is ok in someplaces. If the name has been artificially created using english words, then I don't have an issue with it. Changing the Magister to le recteur is fine, since Magister is his title, not his name. Similar with Deadeye, that's a nickname, not his actual name, not that we know what his real name is.

With the townnames, i think the should be translated/changed if they were also translated in the official Black Gate French version. If Moonglow is still Moonglow, then I would say that Moonshade should stay as Moonshade. If not, then do what you want with it.

You are always going to need to translate some place names though. Places like spinebreaker and skullcrusher won't mean much not being translated.

those are actually translated too!

Spinebreaker Mountain is Montagnes de l'Échine Brisée

Skullcrusher is Brise-Crâne

In french, it sounds pretty good. But believe me when I tell you we argued for a long time to find those names...

Artaxerxes