First of all, I would like to say that the Russian localization of the entire AoE II is very uneven. Some campaigns are well translated, while others look like they were translated by primary school children or special ward patients. I have long wanted to inform you that all 3 “Return of Rome” campaigns fall into the second category. Almost not a single phrase in them is translated correctly. But I will create a more detailed post about this some other time. And now about the most obvious and ridiculous mistake.
It’s not in the original, I checked. It’s only about Ru version.
In Trajan’s campaign, the enemy king is called Osroes I in the text intros (which is correct) and Khosrov I in gameplay (which is not correct). In English, these two names are written very differently, it is impossible to confuse them, but in Russian they differ by only 1 letter: Хосрой (Hosroi) vs Хосров (Hosrov).
When I played it, I immediately suspected that something was wrong here and went to check on Wikipedia.
Khosrov I was the king of Armenia (and this is similar to what happens in this campaign), but this was in 191-217, a century before the events shown:
The correct king is Osroes / Хосрой (reigned 109 - 129):
And you seem to be loving it, saying this is not a priority. In my frame of reference, literacy comes FIRST. Because this is the face of company, and companies usually don’t want it to be clownish.
Deprioritizing localization is one of most annoying things. There were once dedicated sub forums for localization reports, and they were closed in 2020. Localization apparently requires different people than devs and it shouldn’t be a conflict. But Microsoft somehow decides it’s not worth spending.
Russian is the 8th most widely spoken language in the world and, according to some estimates, the 4th most widely spoken language on the Internets. It is one of the official languages in: Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, also it is a second language in Ukraine itself. Oh, and AoE II DOES NOT HAVE Ukrainian localization so Ru version is actually the only one for them!
I think about half of those are former Soviet states. I at least know that the older generation in Georgia speaks Russian, while the younger generation mostly speaks Georgian and English. I don’t know too much about the other countries.
Yes, it would be stupid to deny former Soviet countries accurate translations just because the country that created the language they speak instigated a war.
If there is ever a Caucasus DLC, I think they should add this. It would probably help to bring in a lot more Georgian players.