Sir John has decided to take on yet another project — where do some people find the time? — in addition to his ongoing work translating Dungeon Siege and Ultima 6. This time, he has set his sights on Ultima 7:

I consider to re-translate Ultima 7 – The Black Gate into German again. There are a few but very good reasons I see:
– The old German Version is hard to impossible to get (and on 3.5″ disks only)
– The game featured the “old spelling”, which is meanwhile obsolete
– The version you can get nowadays is binaryily not compatible with the old German version
– The Add-On “Forge of Virtue” has never been translated to German, but is included in all versions available today, eg. at GOG’s

I have for now translated 25-30 conversations but have difficulties to display the German sepcial characters (“Umlauts”). As long as I cannot solve this issue, I will not proceed with the translation: a German version without Umlauts will always only be half way to being perfect, something I do not want to support… I’m not doing things by halves, am I?

Oh, and before you wonder: rest assured – first, I’ll finish the Ultima VI translation, of course

That’s a welcome reassurance at the end there, although it’s good to hear that he’s already had some success in translating conversations in The Black Gate.