I bought it boxed a long time ago, and I remember there was french audio in the game, most notably for the tech discoveries… however, much to my disappointment, I see it missing in the GOG version. Shall I dig for my old DVD ?

Oh and btw, what’s that weird idea of making forums for series of games instead of the games themselves, hence making the whole thing much less accessible ?

In Civilization IV, the language of the tech quotes is determined by the language used at the moment of installation. There used to be a physical version in which you could choose between English, Spanish, Italian, French or German. The in-game language setting would change the texts of the interface. but the tech quotes remained in the installation language.

As far as I know, the GOG installer only contains the tech quote audios in English (it is implied by the available language information -see attached picture). I even did some digging using innoextract and I wasn't able to find audio files for the other languages.

It is understandable that some people would prefer to have the quotes in their own language. However, the ones we got are at least those voiced by Leonard Nimoy.

Thanks for your reply, and for checking the archive ! I didn’t think of doing that, but tbh I would have been surprised if it were in the archive but not in the game installation directory…

More often than not, I choose to play games in english because the french translations are horrendous, however as far as I remember it wasn’t the case for Civ IV, and I used to like the french voice in the game (frankly, I find Nimoy’s reading rather bland in comparison, but that’s a matter of personal taste).

I find disturbing that editors often don’t care to give GOG existing localized versions of their software, and not less annoying that GOG doesn’t seem to bother.

I’m going to look for my old DVD. With some luck it will contain not only the french audio, but other languages as well.

Localizations can be tricky. Sometimes the pblishing rights for a certain language are held by someone different than the current publisher that signs an agreement with GOG and cannot be included. I don't know if that is the case for Civilization; it was more common when localization was performed by a local team to release the game on a new market, rather than when an international version contained several languages from the start.

Why not reach out to the localization team then ? Btw, Civ IV is on Steam too and contains localization, but not 100% since localization is only present for vanilla, not Beyond the Sword ; it’s possible to copy the files from vanilla to BtS, but considering BtS added some techs, it must still be lacking.

This reeks of carelessness more than anything.

I will try to find that DVD, but considering my current computer doesn’t have a DVD drive I will have to find an external one… and maybe while I’m at it, make an image and post info on redump.org, because clearly some things are being lost.

So, I just had my hands on an external DVD player and after checking, my Civ IV DVD is EFIGS, meaning it does have english, french, italian, german and spanish audio among other things (the manual comes in these languages too). I uninstalled the GOG version and installed it instead, and after installing the latest BtS patch, I have a version better than GOG’s (once installed, no DVD is required to play).

Anyone interested ?

However, the techs added in BtS are still in english only. I suspect these were never translated… Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think it’s Sid Meier’s own voice.

Considering some pieces of this game are disappearing, I definitely will have to dump this disc and send the characteristics to redump.org.