All Latin Alphabet Diacritics for AOE2DE

Hi everyone,

I’ve just gone though all the campaigns & historical battles in AOE2DE & I’ve made a list of all the Diacritics that need to be updated across various languages with Latin alphabets:

AOK

Joan of Arc:
4: Châlons

Genghis Khan:
6: Sajó River

Conquerors

El Cid:
5: Dénia

Agincourt:
Frévent

Forgotten

Dracula:
Drăculești
Dănești
Târgoviște

1: Székelys in the intro slideshow
2: István
3: Orșova, Dârstor
4: găraș Râșnov, Akıncı
5: Basarab Laiotă, Šabac,

Bapheus:
Rûm, Çandar

African Kingdoms

Tariq ibn Ziyad:
1: Córdoba
2: Mérida

Francisco de Almeida:
4: Estado da Índia
5: Lourenço in the slideshow intro

Rise of the Rajas

Lê Lợi

1: Đại Việt, Trịnh, Nguyễn, Trần
2: Lê Lai
4 & 5: Nghệ An
5: Đinh Lễ, Lê Triện, Lưu Nhân Chú, Bùi Bị
5 & 6: Đông Đô

Last Khans

Tamerlane:
6: Stefan Lazarević

Lords of the West

Grand Dukes:
2: Alençon in the intro slideshow
4: Rouen in the intro slideshow

Hautevilles:
2: Judith d’Évreux in the intro slideshow
4: Kürboğa
Dawn of the Dukes:

Algirdas & Kęstutis:
Plural of Leitis UU: Leičiai

3: Hacı Beğ
Kiev = Kyiv, Chernigov = Chernihiv

5: Krėva

Jadwiga:
1, 4 & 5: Kraków
2: Władysław II Jagiełło
The towns in Jadwiga 2 all have spellings from different languages:
Lviv (from Ukrainian; Polish - Lwów)
Pohonicz (close to Polish, but correct spelling is Pohonycz; Ukrainian - Pohonich)
Terebovl (from Ukrainian; Polish - Trembowl)
Halych (from Ukrainian; Polish Halicz)
Rohatyn is fine in both languages
3: All 9 towns to be captured:
Grodno/Gardinas/Hrodno
Kaunas/Kowno
Krewo/Krėva/Kreva
Minsk/Mińsk/Minskas
Ostrow/Astrava/Vostrava (correct Polish spelling is Ostrów)
Seinai/Sejny
Trakai/Troki
Vilnius/Wilno
Volkowysk (Wołkowysk/Valkaviskas/Vawkavysk)

Jan Žižka
1: Rožmberk
2: Władysław II Jagiełło
Radzyń in the outro slideshow
3 & 6: Tábor
3: Sudoměř in the outro slideshow
4: Vítkov Hill, Vyšehrad Fortress,
5: Kutná Hora
Rabí Castle in the intro slideshow
6: Žygimantas Korybut
Plzeň

NB: I used the Wikia AOE fanpage to go over all the slideshow texts & objectives/hints/scouts report, so I didn’t include any of the voiced lines. If there’s any others from other campaigns/scenarios, please do write here!

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This is a lot of work, well done
Did you put all this information on the fandom pages? You could add it in the Trivia section

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No, some pages have the correct spelling already, so there’s no need. What I was hoping to happen is if maybe the devs can standardize having every specific place & unit name in the local Diacritics if they use a Latin alphabet.

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It will be difficult to change it in-game
The game and the players are too comfortable and accustomed to the use of English
You can only hope

Speaking as someone who knows a little about both translation theory and localization practice:

Your effort is admirable. But the AoE franchise is aimed at the general audience, including children (the recent releases are rated at ESRB Teen and PEGI 12), not only history and language enthusiasts.

You have to account for the target audience’s accepted language conventions and ability to process foreign words, and cannot push unfamiliar words too hard on them.

For example, native English speakers are likely very used to seeing the diacritical letters from French, German and Spanish, less so to those from Eastern European languages, and significantly less so to the consonants, vowels and tone marks of Vietnamese.

This is similar in principle to why we don’t spell the more common names using local names in English: Padua over Padova, Swabia over Schwaben, Joan of Arc over Jeanne d’Arc, Janissary over Yeŋiçeri, and so on.

Or think of the non-latin-script languages you didn’t cover, like Japanese long vowel marks - Kyōto, Ōsaka, Hyōgo, or Chinese tone marks - Jīn, Xī Xià, Sòng. These diacritics are meaningful (a difference can change one word to another), though we usually don’t write out these diacritics in Western languages, because within the context, the diacriticless spellings are enough to communicate the ideas to a general audience. The same principle applies to many other cases.

I agree that even if not all names are strict transliterations, we still want some degree of consistent standards. For example, the Joan of Arc campaign already features diacritical spellings like château, Orléans, and D’Alençon. It is reasonable to hope other instances are consistent, like Châlons instead of Chalons.

But the reality is that development and outsourced localization are such messy affairs that consistency is not guaranteed, and fixes may take a long time if implemented at all.

For lack of consistency, in the Into China scenario example, the factions were originally spelt with the old Wade-Giles system in AoK (Chin, Hsi Hsia, Sung). AoE2DE actually updated two of them to the modern standard of Pinyin (Jin, Song) while leaving Hsi Hsia the same, likely on account of the “x” letter, which people typically don’t know which sound it represents.

For the localization workflow taking long to react, you can check this other thread about a few misplaced diacritics in AoE3DE, and see how many months it took to fix a French accent, while the Spanish error is still there.

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The way I see it:

  1. Instead of the unrealistic goal of consistent latin spellings between all languages (which goes against translation principles), set more reasonable scopes, with tiered urgency levels.

  2. Urgency Level 0 should be places like the above AoE3DE examples, where diacritics are present but misplaced. Are there such cases in AoE2?

  3. Following that, Level 1 can be inconsistent spelling of the same word (Alençon), Level 2 are exceptions among a consistent group (Châlons among French names), and Level 3 are groups of names where diacritics are consistently missing (all Spanish place names?), Level 4 can be regions where no attempt of strictness is made in English (Eastern European and Asian languages), and so on.

  4. You mentioned the language inconsistency of Eastern European place names. Similar with the Into China faction names, sometimes there may be practical reasons behind them. Technically, such inconsistencies also aren’t mistakes.

  5. Realistically, the devs may consider only Level 0, followed by Level 1, urgent enough to warrant fixing, and the rest will not be changed.

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As a native British English speaker, I think it’s a bit more extreme than this for me. I can just about guess what to do with an acute accent on an e in French, or an umlaut in German, and that’s about it. I don’t even know how ‘Châlons’ would sound different from ‘Chalons’, for example.

The only one of these suggestions that seems important to me is:

since ‘Kyiv’ is now the most common spelling of this word in British English. Of course, I don’t know if this true in American English, which is the language the game is in. (‘Chernigov’ might as well be changed to ‘Chernihiv’ at the same time, but isn’t so well known.)

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Wow, thanks for the detailed explainer!

Also note, that I didn’t do every single unit/leader/place name with the original names in the original languages. I also avoided the languages which don’t use Latin alphabet, so no diacritics for names in Arabic, Persian, Mesoamerican, East Asian, SE Asian (with the exception of Vietnamese) or Indian subcontinent languages. I only focused on the ones that have/need diacritics using a Latin Alphabet.

If a leader has a well known English name, I also kept that English name. So Joan of Arc, Vlad Dracula, Harald Hadraade aren’t changed.

As for the Vietnamese tonal marks, they are being applied inconsistently, since they are already present in some of the campaign slideshows/scouts reports, but not in every instance. Another problem that I encountered was the convention of naming Hanoi in Lê Lợi 4. Hanoi was only called that name starting in the 19th Century during French colonization.

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Now I see where you are coming from.

  • English source text only has diacritics for a handful of French & Spanish words, not all of them. And AoE2DE has introduced instances of “Alencon”, an inconsistency not in HD version.

  • Italian, Spanish, Polish, Vietnamese localizations each only cares about their own orthography.

  • German localization seems strict with European diacritics, but mostly don’t care about Vietnamese, except for two words Chí Linh and Đồng Đô.

  • French localization cares about both European and Vietnamese diacritics, but Vietnamese spellings are still inconsistent.

Unfortunately, the localization workflow seems error-prone (I heard some DLCs have received a machine-quality translation in one language, a fairly good one in another). I also only just noticed that in my AoE3 example above, the translation of “Troupes de Genié” was changed to “Troupes Génie” (correct translation should be Troupes du Génie), fixing the diacritic while changing the grammar from half-wrong to full-broken. :sweat_smile:

image

The Dynasties of India civ names have been translated with definite particles in LatAm Spanish, still unfixed now.

Yeah, that’s an oversimplification. Should have called it Thăng Long - which Civ6 has used for its Vietnamese capital.

The Lê Lợi campaign and Vietnamese civ aren’t great for accuracy. The state only formally changed to the Vietnam name in 19th century, the Rattan Archer unit is basically fictional, they used SEA architecture in the original release, major cities of Vietnam aren’t built in jungles but on flood plains, Lê Lợi 1 calls the northern and southern allies “Trịnh” and “Nguyễn”, which were lords who divided Vietnam after Lê Lợi’s dynasty, whose families gained their powers through following him… and so on.

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