I’ve been sitting on way too much news from Sir John as regards his ongoing work on his German translation of Ultima 6. He resumed work on it earlier this summer, after his work on the German translation of Dungeon Siege had to be put on hold:

translation of the English Dungeon Siege patch has not yet started again and is delayed at the moment due to some real-life issues on the “technical support side” *gg*

Hence, I bite my time with carrying on the translation of the original Ultima VI instead. By now 44 characters are translated. This corresponds – if you like – to Version 0.23. This said, I’ll add some more before releasing a new version, though.

He has made pretty rapid progress since then; he quickly had version 0.28 released, which added translations for a bunch of new areas in the game:

Version 0.28 is done. For now everyone in: the castle, in Britain, the Lycaeum, in Moonglow and Jhelom is talking German. As you can tell from the filename, this sums up to 28% of all conversation files. Talking numbers this means 53 NPCs are translated now.

I had a problem with the file u6edit.sav which bloated up to ~80MB due to reasons beyond me. I suspect some problem with u6edit tools. As my efforts to repair the file were to no avail and the game seems to start up fine without it, too, I left it out of the patch for now.

Unfortunately, this progress was — tragically — lost only a few days later:

it was only three days ago that I was completely and utterly p…d off with all this translation c..p, that everyone who did not cross my way then might consider themselves lucky ? Hm, no, too much emotion I guess. Lets start over again….

it was only three days ago, that I had been slightly annoyed with this translation. I just had spent days and hours to speed things up, made some really good progress, had almost all of Yew’s convos translated, ….. when that Edit-Tool I use stalled and froze with all rpogress since version 0.28 gone for good. Gnaaaaaa 🙁

However: I slept over it, calmed down again and started all over again with Yew NOW actually BEING complete – hipp hipp, hubaah ?

No new version as of yet, just a few lines to let you all know: I’m working my way forth …and back …. and forth again *gg*

He also had some thoughts about how to approach the translation of Skara Brae:

With Skara Bare’s translation ahead of me (I hope I get to it at the weekend next week) my thoughts keep wnadering off to the Quenton murder quest bug. It buggers me (haha!) that this quest is not solvable, and with the tools at hand, that allow me to set flags, add and delete things and objects I keep wondering, whether I cannot come up with some sort of solution for this bug.

It should be doable….somehow….I’m itching to give it a try, but not before this translation has come to an successful end. Perhaps I can come up with an additional quest-bug-patch or the like

But rather than focus on the City of Spirituality right away, Sir John instead worked on some of the other cities and towns:

With having 81 characters translated, it is a good time for one, I think. Up to now already and completely transalted are:
– the castle
– Britain
– Lycaeum
– Moonglow
– Jhelom
– Yew
– Minoc and
– Trinsic

Translations for Skara Brae and New Magincia were added in the next release of the patch:

no groundbreaking news from my side, I’m afraid: translations’s workaday life has gotten hold of me alright summing up to a daily average of about 4 hours at the moment. Everything has come to rest and I’m making pretty good progress. Long story, cut short: here’s a new version 🙂

98 characters are translated by now: more than half of all coversations. 51,3% to be exact

The next version of the patch added translations for Buccaneer’s Den and Paws:

still nothing new from my side: “translations’s workaday life has gotten hold of me alright summing up to a daily average of about 4 hours at the moment. Everything has come to rest and I’m making pretty good progress. Long story, cut short: here’s a new version :-)”

121 characters are translated by now: more than half of all coversations. 63,4% to be exact

Unfortunately, at some point, a bug was introduced into the patch, which required some time to correct:

Just found some serious bugs in the patch that will lead to convos not working as they should. I tracked it down to an issue with decompiling the code, so all versions are affected.

I’d suggest to wait until I have fixed this. Won’t be long, probably 2 days. All patches are compatible with prior savegames, rest assured

The bug was fixed a few days later:

as promised, here is the bugfixed version 0.69. Freshly added are areas Cove and Sutek’s Castle. Fixed are some corrupt convos (incl. Iolo, Anya and some more) and quite a lot characters I seem to have missed before for reasons beyond me are now talking German as well. (namely Tholden, Fyodor, Cullen, Gwenneth, Max, Lazeena, Rob, VanKellian und Tiberius. *ahem* ;-))

All in al, this sums up to 131 of 191 characters being translated by now: this time for real. *gg*

For the stats-freaks: 68,6% of all convos are done now.

Now, you’d think that sixty conversations would still take some time…but with the next patch release, Sir John had whittled the number down to under twenty:

As the name already reveals, the new version incluides all convos on the overworld. Alas, as long as you do not visit the Gargoyles, the game now is completely and utterly German ?

Only 18 of 200 Convos are yet missing:

– all Gargoyles incl. Beh Lem
– Captain John(e)
– Mondain, Minax and Exodus

I sincerely hope, to be able to finish the rest by Setember

Soon thereafter, he focused his efforts on the Shrines of the Eight Virtues, and rather than work from the in-game dialogue, he decided to consult German translations of the various Biblical passages, poems, plays, and other works of literature that the Shrines’ lines were taken from:

As I translated the altars today I noticed a deriving use of language. A quick look in the local search engine and I was certain: for the proverbs and aphorism one can learn at the shrines Richard Garriott used utterings from all the great names in history. That made translating obsolete: instead I busied myself to find the existing translations of Mr. Shakespeare and Co. In the end it proved to be somewhat more tedious then translating the stuff myself, but it was a good deal of fun and change

So, for example, here’s how he translated the Shrine of Honesty:

Shrine of Honesty
Bible, Phillipians 4:8
“Whatsoever things are true…”
“Whatsoever things are honest…”
“If there be any virtue and if there be any praise, think on these things.”
Welcherart Dinge wahr sind…
Welcherart Dinge ehrlich sind… (eigene Übersetzung/own translation)
Wenn es irgendeine Tugend und wenn es irgendein Lob gibt: diese alle erwägt!
(NT Übersetzung/NT Translation W. Einert)

And, ahead of his expected September completion date, Sir John was able to finish translating all dialogues in Ultima 6:

I’m still a bit reluctant to believe – but apparently I’ve done it. At least all text now is fully translated into German. New with this version are the missing:

Please feel free to test the BETA version. Hesitate not fellow Seeker! All your existing savegames will stay compatible with later versions of this patch.

You can grab the beta version of the translation patch from Sir John’s site, or from the project entry here.