So, a while back I took a rather elaborate translation job by a voice acting company who wanted to translate a large amount of dialog from English into Imperial Aramaic so that Darius The Great of Persia could speak in his native tongue for a video game. After it was done, I tried emailing them back a few times to find out how the work was used and if I could get some samples from the voice actor they used to no avail...
(Darius being a bit cocky during his introduction. :-) )
You should have seen my shock when I came across Darius speaking those very lines I translated in a YouTube video for Civilization 5 released back in September. Talk about ultimate geek street-cred.
It was a project fraught with perils that only William Fulco could understand. :-)
Darius' native tongue was Old Persian, but Aramaic was sort of his "hobby language" of which he had enough enthusiasm for to make it the official language of the western half of his empire and the vehicle of international commerce. It was a language that he, himself, did a good deal of correspondence in.
I started working from actual documents that he sent, using the greetings and partings, and for some of the more modern lines I had to get a bit creative, even re-writing them to things that were more period-appropriate. When it was all said and done, I packaged everything together in sound files to give the voice actor something to go by as well as a little pep-talk about its historical significance.
He seems to have done it justice. :-)
...
And now the ironic bit?
I'm *horrible* and I mean *absolutely horrible* at Civ... :-)
Peace,
-SteveLabels: aramaic, Civilization 5, Darius I, news, translation
