Language goofs (moddable?)

[tater]

Didn't see another post on this with a search.

There are language goofs in the game, some with the voice acting, some with terms used in the sub or the GUI. Thought we might start a list.

1. The use of "Abandon Career" in the "office" is a very poor choice of words, it suggests that you'll never use that character again, not just that you have to exit for a while so your wife can use the computer

2. I had to blow tanks in a task force after a DC attack (ouch) and soon I heard "man down on deck!" then "Medic!" Submarines (the Navy and Marines in general) don't have "medics" they have a "corpsman" or likely on a ship they might just ask for the doc. Not sure what should be best, but I'm confident they'd not say "medic" ever.

Feel free to add to the list. I'm sure there are more, part of the problem is the voice volume levels are so low I have trouble hearing them.

[SteamWake]

Ive got two words for you

Rudder, Rudder

[Bill Nichols]

"Ahead slow" when "All ahead one-third" is meant

Also, courses less than 100-degrees should be preceeded by 'zero', as in: "course zero nine zero", not "course ninety"

[Payoff]

"We are out of oxygen sir, we must surface" I have changed a lot of these myself. They are just too annoying.

[mookiemookie]

"assigned to the Pearl Harbor"

[Chock]

It's easy enough to mod these to your personal preference, just find the relevant WAV file in the sounds folder and replace it with one you think is more appropriate. You can have a lot of fun creating these with a sound editing application, and there are plenty of inexpensive and even free ones out there. Likewise there are lots of sources for WAV files on the internet if you don't think your voice-acting is up to the challenge, and if you are only using these for yourself, then there is probably no harm in that.

The difficulty comes in using sound sources for your mod and then making widespread use of them by distributing them. It's for this reason that I only post sound mods that I have created using my own stuff, or modifications of the sounds SH users will already have, or ones that I know the copyright is okay on, fortunately I have a lot of sound-effect disks. (although even doing that is questionable from a legal point of view, in that doing so with SH sounds means you are redistributing Ubisoft's stuff, granted it will likely be to people who already have them).

Lots of mods you find for SH3 and SH4 completely ignore this and while modders seem to get away with it (since they are not charging people for their mod), they are effectively stealing someone else's work. I personally would not want to risk doing that too much, which is why any mods I make that use stuff like that never see the light of day on the 'net. GWX is a case in point here, it's a fantastic mod, but it is totally illegal in many of its features, in that it uses sounds from Das Boot, excerpts from Peter Gabriel's music etc, which are things that people who use the mod in SH3 might not have actually previously possessed.

I note with irony, that my Subsim title is now Medic!

[Safe-Keeper]

I note with irony, that my Subsim title is now Medic!

Not Corpsman?!

:p

Biggest Engirsh care so far is 'could not connect to the online'. Who cares, it's a minor issue and can be easily fixed.

[tater]

How about the use of the term "refit" for "refuel/rearm?"

[LukeFF]

Originally Posted by tater

How about the use of the term "refit" for "refuel/rearm?"

You can change that in the menu.txt file. Look for line 3623. Same for "Abandon Career" - line 152.

Speaking of all this, this is a good site for checking whether the nautical terms in SH4 are correct:

http://www.seatalk.info/

[maerean_m]

Originally Posted by mookiemookie

"assigned to the Pearl Harbor"

It was meant to be "assigned to the Pearl Harbor flotilla", but the flotilla word didn't make it in the game because of all the localization issues (SH4 was translated in german, spanish, french, dutch, polish, czech, hungarian, russian and even chinese etc). Almost every language needs a complete new set of fonts (because of the custom characters). The chinese actualy have 50.000 characters in each font. You can't imagine the amount of time lost with this kind of issues.

You have to understand that video games don't speak English, yet SH4 had to be built to be translated in any language on earth, so I consider the number of language problems are very few compared to the complexity of the game (SH4 is not like a car game where all it displays is the car's speed). SH4 is a masterpiece even at this level (of the localization).

[tater]

What's a "flotilla?"

Lukeff, I expected it was an easy mod, OTOH some (most? The huge majority?) of people won't mod the game. The "abandon career" thing is really nonintuitive for anyone who speaks english since it is plainly stating that you'll never play that character/career again. Seems like that should get patched in, IMO (for those who won't mod, but might DL an official patch).

I understand the localization issues are pretty difficult, but my take is this: if it's a u-boat game, the thing should be spot on in German, and as good as it can be in other languages, even if it's not so great in english (I can live with that, or dust off my german (or ask my wife who is fluent, lol)). If it's a USN submarine game, it should be spot-on in American english, and as good as possible in other languages---and if that makes it so-so in other languages, that's fine (as long as it's playable). If there was a japanese version (playable IJN subs), then I'd expect the language to be as good as is possible in japanese, and if other languages suffer, so be it.