De la neige? C’est pas normal.

It’s one of my favorite lines from Tomb Raider.

If you haven’t played the game and don’t mind being spoiled, you’re on this island and this line comes when you emerge from a bunker into a suddenly snowy area.

The visuals, the music, and the line just seem perfect.

Of course, speedrunning has meant that this is now a line I’ve heard far too many times as there’s a damn difficult skywalk around this area. If you fail, you’ll get to hear the line and the music again. And again. And literally you may end up hearing it every 10-15 seconds or so, depending on how good you are at the skywalk.

Well, as part of my geekery, I’ve been trying to get ahold of the raw French audio of the game. Frankly, I’m doing it because I’d love to be able to mimic Alice David, who is the French Lara Croft in Tomb Raider 2013.

To my surprise, I’ve found lots of bits and pieces of audio that I’ve never heard in the game. Some of this can be chalked up to things like Lara giving you hints when you’re stuck on a puzzle (and to this date, I haven’t ever attempted a single optional tomb). But I’m almost certain some of it is simply because it was additional dialogue that they chose not to use (like Lara making a crack about the boat in the sky).

Either way, that means that I haven’t seen subtitles for a lot of it. And for French, that’s pratically fatal as I comprehend maybe 50% of written French and like 2-5% of it spoken.

Well, I finally had the bright idea to see if the subtitles were encoded inside the same file that the audio is in (a .mul file which is… well, I have no idea). And it turns out it is.

I’m hoping to find a somewhat automatic way to do this stuff, but the *nix command strings gets you part of the way in terms of getting the subtitles out of the .mul. Huge problem is that anything with diacritic marks gets ignored (think é, à, ç, etc).

So for now, what I’ve been doing is manually opening files in Hex Fiend which will show the ascii style text on one side along with gibberish anywhere there’s a diacritic. I then take that hex data and paste it into hex2string online to get some properly formatted foreign text.

What I’d love to do is to automate this whole process so I can extract the text out of all of the dialogue easily. Because, science! Also, hey, I’d finally be able to officially find out what Vladimir says in the Russian camp (instead of “speaking Russian” or something similar in the subtitles, the Russian version actually has proper Russian subtitles. Imagine that!).

Regardless, here is what I found interesting about the de la neige bit. In most of the languages, it’s basically what the English says, which is:

Snow? This isn’t normal.

The languages that follow this pattern are:

French:

De la neige ? C’est pas normal.

(It took me ages to figure out, but the “de la/du/des” construction is a partitive article in French. It’s used to indicate “some” or an undefined quantity of something. So now you can be sure to think of this line as: “Undefined quantity of snow? That’s not normal.”)

Here are the other languages that follow the “Snow? That’s not normal” pattern.

Polish:

Sníh? To není normální.

Dutch:

Sneeuw? Dit is niet normaal.

German:

Schnee? Das ist doch nicht normal.

Portuguese:

Neve? Isso não é normal.

Spanish:

¿Nieve? Esto no es normal.

First, I have no idea what the Arabic says as Google Translate just makes a mess of the Arabic that hex2string gives me. Not sure whose fault that is since I don’t speak Arabic and can’t see who’s introducing the gibberish. But here is it is for reference.

.ﺎﻴﻌﻴﺒﻃ ﺲﻴﻟ ﺍذﻫ ؟ﺞﻠﺛ

Other than that, I feel there are some gems in the translation differences.

We’ve got a slight variance in the Italian:

Neve? Impossibile.

(Snow? Impossible.)

As well as the Chinese:

下雪？這太不正常了吧。

(Snow? This too is not normal now.)

And then things start to get different with the Japanese:

雪？　どうなってるの？

(Snow? What’s the deal?)

And the Korean:

눈이 와? 뭔가 이상한데.

(And snow? Something weird.)

But my favourite of all would probably be the Russian which is simply:

Снег? Аномалия…

(Snow? Anomaly…)