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GAME BUILD #: 144358
GAME PLATFORM: Steam
OPERATING SYSTEM: Linux
ISSUE EXPERIENCED
DESCRIBE THE ISSUE IN DETAIL (below). LIMIT TO ONE BUG PER THREAD.
Fire lancers are localized to “Feuer-Lanzenreiter”, which basically says “Fire lance rider”.
FREQUENCY OF ISSUE
How often does the issue occur? CHOSE ONE; DELETE THE REST!
100% of the time / matches I play (ALWAYS)
REPRODUCTION STEPS
List CLEAR and DETAILED STEPS we can take to reproduce the issue ourselves… Be descriptive!
Here’s the steps to reproduce the issue:
Start the game (with language set to german)
Open up the technology tree or start a game with a civ that gets fire lancers
Fire lancers are named “Feuer-Lanzenreite” (eng. “Fire lance riders”)
EXPECTED RESULT
What was SUPPOSED to happen if the bug you encountered were not present?
They should be named like an infantry unit, not a cavalry unit. Like “Feuerlanzen-Kämpfer” or “Feuerlanzen-Träger” or “Feuer-Lanzenträger” or something like that.
IMAGE
ALWAYS attach a PICTURE (.jpg, .png, .gif) or VIDEO (.mp4, YouTube link) that highlights the problem.
I noticed there are a lot of other translation errors in the german version.
For example in the german techtree for the Portuguese it says “Entsendet +10 % LP” which makes no sense. It should say “Schiffe +10% LP”.
Another one is the technology Murder Holes.
The Icon says “Mordlöcher” which is correct but the description that appears when hovering over the icon calls it “Maschikulis”. For consistency it should only be called by one name. I would just keep the name “Mordlöcher” because it was called like this since 1999.
These are only 2 mistakes I noticed and there are a lot more but I am too lazy to name everyone right now.
I feel like this was translated using an AI. Why else would they translate “Ships” to “Entsendet”.
We need proper translators, that also play and love the this game, to give players the best experience while playing in german (and other languages too btw).
To be honest, it feels like the german translation has been replaced by a google translate version. It’s that bad…
Some more examples:
Malay
“35% Reusen kosten -33% und bieten +200% mehr Nahrung” (“35% fishtraps cost -33% and have +200% more food” what is that even supposed to mean???)
“Häfen +6% mehr Sichtweite” (“Docks +6% line of sight” what? why 6%???)
Franks
“Ritter haben +2 Punkte an Sichtweite” (“Knights have +2 points of line of sight” where do the points come from?!?)
The worst I have yet encountered tho is:
“Pierce armor” is sometimes translated as “Rüstung durschlagen” (who thought it would be a good idea to translate the “Pierce” as a verb???)
This means that “+1 melee/+1 pierce armor” is translated as “+1 Nahkampf-/Rüstung durchschlagen” (which basically translated to “+1 melee-pierce/+1 armor-pierce”, what the heck?)
Actually, that’s not correct. The icon’s name was often shortened from the full description for space reasons, but it has always been called “Mörderlöcher.”
“Entfernt minimale Reichweite […], damit sie Ihre Feinde in deren Lager angreifen können.”
This comes from the English
“Removes minimal distance, so they can attack enemies at their base.”
which is ambiguous – base could mean the tower’s base or the enemy camp. The auto-translator chose Lager (“camp”), but it really ought to read Turmsockel or Fuß, or better yet revert to the original sense: “so they can attack enemies under them.”
They should immediately roll back the bulk replacement of all those mistranslated descriptions and restore the originals. Who even signed off on that change? Going forward, they must use a far better translation engine, ChatGPT alone outperforms their current tool, or, better yet, engage professional translators.
Wow nice catch. I overlooked this one. Thanks for pointing that out.
Edit:
I am not 100% sure but I think the translation got worse with update 141935. In the patch notes it says "Updated wording throughout the entire game to be more consistent and more accurate ".
Before that update the translation was more or less fine.
Those are really bad, obvious errors that would be so easy to fix. I’m glad I keep playing the game in English, because the localization became truly terrible.
Comments from other people say there are problems in other languages as well. So it’s not a german only problem. I hope this topic gets enough attention eventually. Kinda sad that the localization from 1999 is better than in 2025.
Yes, I saw your post on reddit, thank you for that!
I was really frustrated with the fire lancers and even created a bash script (for linux) to change them from “Feuerlanzenreiter” to “Feuerlanzenkämpfer”…
#!/bin/bash
cd ~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/AoE2DE/resources/de/
find . -type f -exec sed -i 's/Feuerlanzenreiter/Feuerlanzenkämpfer/g' {} +
find . -type f -exec sed -i 's/Feuer-Lanzenreiter/Feuerlanzenkämpfer/g' {} +
GAME INFORMATION
These details are CRITICAL; DO NOT skip them or your issue may not be reviewed.
