EB: Voicemod Preview

[LusitanianWolf]

By the hammer of Thor, you are my heroes now!!!!!


And I was thinking about make an topic asking about pre battle speeches!!!
Even if I will not understand one single word that will be completely awesome!!!!

[Sarkiss]

excellent preview guys!
leaves me wandering how did you manage to produce so much in this, generaly laziest month of the year! first Hayastan's preview now this. do you people get a time off at all?
keep a good work up!

People may wonder why it should be done, or a plain simple why the hell bother if about 97% or more of those hearing it won't understand what is being said without reading the subtitles?

does that mean there will be subtitles?

[Shigawire]

excellent preview guys!
leaves me wandering how did you manage to produce so much in this, generaly laziest month of the year! first Hayastan's preview now this. do you people get a time off at all?

We actually did much of this a while ago. The Punic translations were completed some 6-7 months ago? And then refined and tuned, and reviewed by Dr Krahmalkov, some 3 months ago. Greek was of course translated back in January of 2005 by Teleklos Archelaou. But these fantastic reproductions by the A-Tech team and the Pentatonic boys are more recent, and have been continuously on-going for some months now.

We also have a lot of other translations for voicemods, that are on the "backburner" so to speak, that we did long ago. For example we have Q-Celtic translated (Anthony), and Ranika once upon a time translated battle commands to Britonic as well. So we have 2 other potential Celtic voicemods. However, no faction require any of these so far. Casse were more Belgic, and would have spoken a dialect of Gallic (K-Celtic), not Britonic (P-Celtic). However, the battle voicemods operate primarily as unit-oriented, and not faction-oriented. So we could indeed make these voicemods and apply them to the correct troops.
For example, the Goidilic hammermen could use the Q-Celtic. But Lusotannan will use its own voicemod, "Lusitanian" - perhaps our most audacious and speculative list of translations so far. But since we aren't a scholarly peer-reviewed scientific mag, we have the luxury to take risks and recreate language based on the science of linguistics. Just as Blitzkrieg is doing with Proto-Germanic, so has Anthony done the Lusitanian. However Lusitanian was far more difficult, I'm thankful we got the most difficult out of the way so early.

does that mean there will be subtitles?

Yes, of course. It wouldn't be fun or interesting if you couldn't understand it. You can enable subtitles in RTW audio options. Try it. I think it even works for Battle-Events (The Day is Ours!)
They're all written down in text-files.

I'd be interested to hear of your plans regarding some of the less documented factions and their languages, especially Sakas and Sarmatians. No doubt Pahlavan voices will be more suitable than the current Gallic ones, but are you going to try and reconstruct their native languages and make them voice mods of their own?

Pahlava would be an excellent placeholder for the Saka-Rauka and Sauromatae, certainly better than Gallic. My initial plans were to use something akin to Ossetic - spoken in Ossetia (close to Grozny, Chechnya). The Iron dialect of Ossetic would probably be best suited. We haven't had any progress in this however, and to be frank I haven't given it much effort. Though we have got a dictionary online, plus I have bought a physical dictionary/grammar. It's only a matter of time before we get some progress in this as well I'm sure.

For Saka-Rauka, something different - a mixture of Khotanese Saka with Pashton (two of the many many languages around central Eurasia, Afghanistan) would be best suited. But I know very little on this. Zaknafien and Krusader knows more about this particular item, as Zak has access to some kind of dictionary he acquired in Afghanistan I believe. But he's on active service in Iraq now.

If anyone, ever, doubts the commitment in EB to making this endeavor as accurate as is humanly possible, point them to this topic. I read the part on the Greek voicemod, and thought 'hey, this is impressive stuff!'; lets just say my jaw was on the floor by the time I'd finished the Germanic section of the preview. I wish you guys the best of luck, and it seems a congratulations is definitely in order for Shigawire for his major part in this. This is what EB is all about, and I salute it.

Hehe thanks for the kind words Geoffrey.
I could never do any of this without the many volunteers who believed in this idea, joined and produced. Those who did most of the hard core translation work. Of course, I do take the credit for being the major "driver" and organizer for much of this, and having done a little translating as well (Latin and Punic), and the Latin voices.. But now it's growing far beyond me. To give you an illustration of the extent - I haven't even heard the audio produced by the A-Tech studio - but I do intend to, I promise!

It's interesting, gratifying and humbling to see that what I started 3 years ago has matured and grown up and "left daddy" so to speak.

Here's something I haven't told anyone yet:
I never expected it to reach this far to be honest.