August 30, 2010

What Did He Say?

Filed under: Main — admin @ 12:01 am

Computer games are so realistic these days. In Day of Defeat and Call Of Duty: World At War, the enemies speak German and Japanese. In Call Of Duty Modern Warfare 2, the characters speak Russian, Portuguese, and Arabic. But what are they saying?

It’s difficult for an English-speaker to discern what sounds are being made in other languages. Unless you’re familiar with the language, there’s really no point in trying.

Despite there being no point in trying, I did so anyway.

When a member of the Brazilian militia kills you in Call Of Duty Modern Warfare 2, he says something that sounds to my ears like, “Aboo nil, trolly zodd.”

Venturing over to Google’s Language tools, I tried typing in just about every variation of Aboo nil, trolly zodd into the translator. No luck. I have no idea what it means, mostly because I can’t spell it properly for Portuguese.

So I gave up.

In World at War, I could sometimes make out what the Germans were saying. I don’t speak German. I can’t spell in German. But when I threw a grenade at a German soldier, he said, “Scheiße! Granate!” That was easy to figure out.

In Modern Warfare 2, I can make out some of what the Russians say. I studied Russian in both High School and College. I’m far from fluent, but some of the Russian I can understand.

If you mess something up and a Russian character in the game notices, he says, “что тут.” That sounds like “Chto toot.” It means “What’s here?”

The funniest thing the Russians say is, “мне нужна врач.” They say that when they notice something is wrong and they’re all scrambling around to find your guy. The problem is that “мне нужна врач” means “I need a doctor.” It’s probably something the game developers coded as sound to play when one of the Russian characters is injured.

For example, in some games, your guy cries out “Medic” for help. It makes sense that the Russian guys would do the same thing. It doesn’t make sense that they would walk around saying “I need a doctor” when they’re looking for an intruder.

That discrepancy makes me wonder whether any other foreign language sound bytes are equally incorrect for the circumstances. For example, “Aboo nil, trolly zodd” might just mean, “No, you cannot date my sister.” Who knows?

3 Comments

  1. When id’s Wolfenstein 3-D came out, several of my friends wondered “why are they saying ‘shoe shuffle’ ?”. It was a long while before we found out they were saying “Schutzstaffel”, the Nazi SS’s equivalent of saying “stop ! police !”. I much preferred it when, many years later, the Nazis in Return To Castle Wolfenstein spoke english in heavy german accents. Not realistic, but it afforded me much smoother game play; I never paused to think about what they were saying.

    Comment by sean bernard — August 31, 2010 @ 5:58 pm

  2. I remember that. I thought they were saying “Shoot staffle” cause regardless they always shot you.

    Comment by admin — August 31, 2010 @ 6:09 pm

  3. I have thought the same thing when playeing Stalker clear sky which is Russian it made me laugh because the game was quite buggy and sometimes the enemy would start doing what looked like a chicken walk and they kept saying, something like arogio brow. I have no idea what it means or how to spell it.

    Comment by chiefnoobie — September 7, 2010 @ 1:39 pm

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