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 A Town Called Malus wrote:

 kendoka wrote:

It is way past time for Germany and France to wake up. Their countries are slowly becoming irrelevant and their languages are already almost unimportant. Tough.
Also, even though England and the US within 10 years will be poor 3rd world countries their language is here to stay. Simplified English will be the new world language.

Errrr... Germany is anything but becoming irrelevant. Also, Chinese or Spanish/Portuguese is likely to be the world language with the rise of China and South American economies.

China is only 1/6 of the world, the other 5/6 find English a *lot* easier to learn than Chinese. All of Europe, the Americas and Africa already uses the alphabet, and Indians already speak English because of colonial ties...you are kidding yourself if you think that Chinese will dominate in the years to come. If anything it will diminish in importance as the Chinese scurry to learn English, already in Japan they are struggling to get enough to people to learn English, I have no reason to suppose that the same will not happen in China.

Wow, people are always looking for something new about which to be angry at GW. And as expected, a topic like this is already devolving into a weird and often uninformed political science discussion.

Whether or not GW is putting dedicated foreign names on their model kits I should think isn't likely to bother that much of their customer base compared to the more alarming issue for non-English speakers than their starting to publish some books that are "English only" (e.g., Death From The Skies).

 BrassScorpion wrote:
Wow, people are always looking for something new about which to be angry at GW. And as expected, a topic like this is already devolving into a weird and often uninformed political science discussion.

Whether or not GW is putting dedicated foreign names on their model kits I should think isn't likely to bother that much of their customer base compared to the more alarming issue for non-English speakers than their starting to publish some books that are "English only" (e.g., Death From The Skies).

Having Codex-entry and figure-box use the same name is pretty important.
It makes purchasing matching GW-products much easier.

I am finding it amusing that the majority of the people who dismiss this as a non-issue are from primarily English speaking countries.

Could it be possible they are simply printing alternate boxes and instructions region specific past that point? Otherwise it is a bit odd isn't it.

I don't think it would be a big deal if they always had just English, French and Spanish... but to cut 4 languages suddenly is noteworthy, and I expect potentially quite annoying for fans in those respective countries who are used to their material being natively available.

xruslanx wrote:
China is only 1/6 of the world, the other 5/6 find English a *lot* easier to learn than Chinese. All of Europe, the Americas and Africa already uses the alphabet, and Indians already speak English because of colonial ties...you are kidding yourself if you think that Chinese will dominate in the years to come. If anything it will diminish in importance as the Chinese scurry to learn English, already in Japan they are struggling to get enough to people to learn English, I have no reason to suppose that the same will not happen in China.

95% of all statistics are totally made up
But good to know that the use of a Latin alphabet (there is no such thing as a Kyrillic alphabet in Europe ) and the rarity of Japanese learning English is a proof of why English will soon dominate the world

 MajorTom11 wrote:
Could it be possible they are simply printing alternate boxes and instructions region specific past that point?

No, German stockists were officially informed about this change. The price list now features German and English names, so that they are able to make a connection between what people want and what people get

I don't understand your post. 5/6 of the world not being Chinese is not something I have pulled out of my arse, it's a fact, checkable in about 5 seconds on wikipedia. Japan struggling to learn English is based on what people who live and work in Japan have told me.

English is already dominating the world. If you want to do business with Africa or India, it will be in English.

xruslanx wrote:
I don't understand your post. 5/6 of the world not being Chinese is not something I have pulled out of my arse, it's a fact, checkable in about 5 seconds on wikipedia.

Takes only 5 seconds to check your post that you claimed something different about the 5/6 of mankind, something obviously pulled ...

And good to know that you not only deny the existence of the Kyrillic alphabet in Europe, but of French and Portuguese colonies in Africa as well.

The package my Tesseract Vault came in, which is using the newer style of packaging, has product descriptions in English and no less than 6 other dirty* foreign languages, which I'm guessing are French, German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese and at least one of the Chinese dialects.

The "Warning: Choking Hazard. Small Parts." block on the bottom is in, like, all the languages. All of them. Probably even Klingon* for all I know.

The box image for the Necron Destroyer squadron (which also uses the newer packaging style) on GW's NA site shows descriptions in 7 languages too, but the box images for the new Tac Squads and Sternguard (as we've seen) only use 3 languages.

Perhaps the image Kroothawk and the GW site is currently using is just a mock-up of the packaging, as the product(s) within have yet to be released? Or perhaps they are using more regional-focused packaging from here on? Or, especially since this is a SM release, and likely to be in very high demand, they are using regional manufacturing AND packaging for this release alone?

Nah, thats all silly, clearly GW hates Germany and/or money*.





*please note: Sarcasim.

 Kroothawk wrote:

xruslanx wrote:
I don't understand your post. 5/6 of the world not being Chinese is not something I have pulled out of my arse, it's a fact, checkable in about 5 seconds on wikipedia.

Takes only 5 seconds to check your post that you claimed something different about the 5/6 of mankind, something obviously pulled ...

And good to know that you not only deny the existence of the Kyrillic alphabet in Europe, but of French and Portuguese colonies in Africa as well.

I have no idea what you're getting at now...would you like me to admit that I'm a racist? And possibly make some bongo-bongo comments?

The future is in English, whether you like it or not.

This sort of ties back around to the growth issue which came about discussing GW/Hasbro...and also FFG. Hasbro is seeing double digit growth in BRIC countries. FFG is still seeing huge sales growth in localized versions of their products.

GW is removing text from boxes...

Here we go

Rank Country (or dependent territory) Population Date % of world
population Source
– World 7,108,400,000 September 1, 2013
1 China[8] 1,359,680,000 September 1, 2013 19.1%
2 India 1,233,290,000 September 1, 2013 17.3%
3 United States 316,570,000 September 1, 2013 4.45%
4 Indonesia 237,641,326 May 1, 2010 3.34%
5 Brazil 201,032,714 July 1, 2013 2.83%

I mean, it's from Wikipedia, but he's right. It took about 5 seconds to google.

 Kroothawk wrote:

xruslanx wrote:
China is only 1/6 of the world, the other 5/6 find English a *lot* easier to learn than Chinese. All of Europe, the Americas and Africa already uses the alphabet, and Indians already speak English because of colonial ties...you are kidding yourself if you think that Chinese will dominate in the years to come. If anything it will diminish in importance as the Chinese scurry to learn English, already in Japan they are struggling to get enough to people to learn English, I have no reason to suppose that the same will not happen in China.

95% of all statistics are totally made up
But good to know that the use of a Latin alphabet (there is no such thing as a Kyrillic alphabet in Europe ) and the rarity of Japanese learning English is a proof of why English will soon dominate the world

I think he may have meant that it's difficult to find enough TEACHERS for the people who want to learn English. Otherwise you're right, what he said about Japan makes no sense.

It's unfortunate when a native speaker isn't really capable of expressing himself properly in his own language, but it's typical of the level of education in the UK these days. Perhaps ESL learners "find English a lot easier to learn than Chinese" because it's so much easier to speak it as well as or better than a native speaker.

 BrassScorpion wrote:
Wow, people are always looking for something new about which to be angry at GW. And as expected, a topic like this is already devolving into a weird and often uninformed political science discussion.

Whether or not GW is putting dedicated foreign names on their model kits I should think isn't likely to bother that much of their customer base compared to the more alarming issue for non-English speakers than their starting to publish some books that are "English only" (e.g., Death From The Skies).

While in general I agree that this is a tempest in a teacup, it is a little odd for GW to do this, since leaving the names for products in half a dozen languages instead of 2-3 wouldn't cost them any additional money, and cutting them saves them nothing. It's a bit puzzling, but I think it's probably premature to excoriate GW for this.

-C6

So has anyone actually seen one of the boxes in a German store yet?

 JB wrote:
But they print all boxes with the same text.

You are 100% right. I went and dug out a recent battle box that I won in tournament play. and saw what you were saying to my confusion. I do have GW product that does not have multiple languages. But that is old stuff.

As I have always said, in all fairness if I'm wrong on the topic that I am commenting on, I will come back and address the issue which I am doing now. I was wrong on my line of thought and now going to have to re-evaluate this topic, which is not a bad thing over all.

Thank you for making me see my error. -Adam

 Adam LongWalker wrote:

 JB wrote:
But they print all boxes with the same text.

You are 100% right. I went and dug out a recent battle box that I won in tournament play. and saw what you were saying to my confusion. I do have GW product that does not have multiple languages. But that is old stuff.

As I have always said, in all fairness if I'm wrong on the topic that I am commenting on, I will come back and address the issue which I am doing now. I was wrong on my line of thought and now going to have to re-evaluate this topic, which is not a bad thing over all.

Thank you for making me see my error. -Adam

Thanks Adam, sorry if my comment came off as a bit abrupt. I am interested in the topic but would like to approach it objectively, which means first trying to understand the facts (such as the current box labeling policy).

Unfortunately the thread is getting a bit heated and off topic, so I'll drop out. It still surprises that GW would make this change and I'm still puzzled as to why since it doesn't appear to cost them anything to keep all seven languages.

As for previous comments of interest, I agree that most of the target demographic of young people (at least in Germany where I have lived) are not sufficiently fluent in English to handle rulebooks, codices, and other supplements if they are English language only (such as Death from the Skies).

Regarding the comment on education in English in Germany (and Austria or Switzerland), it is not required for all students. Our German speaking friends would have to describe the policies of the different countries, states, and school types. It is a tangled web to me. In Germany alone, every state is different, and there are at least five different secondary school types. I'm sure the other countries have similarly diverse educational systems and probably none have compulsory education in English. Yes, you will find certain school types in specific cities or states that require it. However, does 2-3 years of language training make one fluent? I'm skeptical unless one has both motivation and a means to apply the learning. I'm always impressed by those that communicate fluently here on Dakka since I struggle in German language 40K forums.

I'll avoid commenting on the trend of the world towards anything since I get a full serving of that blarney at work. I don't think anyone here is overwrought about GW dropping kit titles for five languages. It's just discussion of a change that is significant for a large number of hobbyists.

Perhaps, I am more sensitive to the continental viewpoint since I do see this topic as a reasonable issue for friendly discussion. Therefore, it is a bit of a shame that we took a left turn away from friendly as people began waving flags, dropping insults, and discussing the future domination of the globe.

About twenty people have said it, so can we just draw a line under it and combine all of their posts with one phrase?

Mountains out of molehills, storms in teacups, translated codexes and rulebooks ensure that nobody really gives a gak about one line on a box, and Kroothawk is about as impartial with regard to GW as Grand Ayatollah Sistani is about Religious preference.

 adhuin wrote:

 Malika2 wrote:

So do you guys call Spiderman 'hämähäkki mies'?

Comics & Characters name is Hämähäkkimies in Finland, the movie titles go by dual titles of "Spider-Man – Hämähäkkimies".
Real names like Peter Parker is/was still Peter Parker, most of the hero names were translated, with few exceptions.

EDIT: Looks like the comics nowadays have Dual titles of "Spider-man - Hämähäkkimies" as well.

Dear God, that's awful!

Are people not allowed to make observations any more?

Kroot simply makes a post 'hmm interesting, no more foreign language printed on the front of boxes' and then within a few pages it seems to have degenerated into personal, overly-sensitive and defensive posts.

As has been pointed out, this isn't really an issue but I think people are more curious regarding the reasoning behind it (especially as you would have thought the current model of printing every language on a box was most efficient logistically). I suppose a good question might be at this point (although perhaps a little over-cautious) is what might this mean with regards to non-English publications in future?

Well, that simple observation was coupled with a (hopefully tongue-in-cheek) tinfoil hat theory about GW forcing their customers to learn English in order to play... so I'm not surprised at the discussion.


When I read the headline I was hoping for a moment that GW would *finally* get rid of the inane German names for their units they had established in the 90's... but sadly, no.

 mattyrm wrote:
About twenty people have said it, so can we just draw a line under it and combine all of their posts with one phrase?

Mountains out of molehills, storms in teacups, translated codexes and rulebooks ensure that nobody really gives a gak about one line on a box, and Kroothawk is about as impartial with regard to GW as Grand Ayatollah Sistani is about Religious preference.

This thread has probably run its course really, but sorry, "translated codexes and rulebooks ensure that nobody really gives a gak" simply isn't true anymore. Several Scrolls of Binding for Fantasy, Death from the Skies, and the 40k supplements (all containing rules and thus a little more than irrelevant hobby-content) were not translated anymore. Even the hardback mini rulebook, the large version of which is already translated, is only available in English. Two or three years ago this would have been unthinkable. So, the box issue probably has to be viewed in context.

In my group we have an Iyanden player and a Black Legion player. Both will not buy the supplements in English. I realize you don't care, and neither do we in our group, but GW should care, because they've lost two sure sales. Anecdotal evidence and all, but still.

Also, GW seems to be beginning to fracture their player base considering all the arguments I've witnessed over Death from the Skies at local tournaments, the point of which being the difficulty to solve rules disputes when one side doesn't understand the English wording and the arbiter is less than trustworthy because he's only semi-fluent himself. Yes, those concerns are probably unfounded, but does it really pay for GW to create such arguments in the first place?

Finally, the point has already been made, but what's so difficult to understand about this:

John is 13 years old and wants to start tabletop gaming. His local store carries two games. One choice is Infinity, which in his parallel universe has the core rules in English, but most expansions (which he is told are used regularly by some players in his area) are only in Spanish. Also, all the unit names on the boxes/blisters are Spanish, too, and mean nothing to him. The other choice is Warmachine, where all the materials are in English and he has already taken a fancy to the "Hammersmith" Warjack because it looks and SOUNDS cool.

Which choice is he more likely to make?

And if you were a company trying to sell to John, which publishing model would you copy?

I believe most posters making this "storm in the teacup" are less "OMG GW SO HATES GERMANY!" and more 1.) "Why would they continue to scale-down language support?" and 2.) "Did they think about the possible consequences?"

xruslanx wrote:China is only 1/6 of the world, the other 5/6 find English a *lot* easier to learn than Chinese.

cincydooley wrote:Here we go

Rank Country (or dependent territory) Population Date % of world
population Source
– World 7,108,400,000 September 1, 2013
1 China[8] 1,359,680,000 September 1, 2013 19.1%
2 India 1,233,290,000 September 1, 2013 17.3%
3 United States 316,570,000 September 1, 2013 4.45%
4 Indonesia 237,641,326 May 1, 2010 3.34%
5 Brazil 201,032,714 July 1, 2013 2.83%

I mean, it's from Wikipedia, but he's right. It took about 5 seconds to google.

Doesn't look to me like a certified poll on 5/6 of mankind, if they find Chinese or English easier to learn. Not even close.
Small detail: Many South East Asia countries have a Chinese minority active in trade, e.g. Malaysia and Indonesia.

xruslanx wrote:All of Europe, the Americas and Africa already uses the alphabet

Wrong, see Kyrillic (and Greek) alphabet. Most Eastern Europe countries use Kyrillic.

xruslanx wrote:If you want to do business with Africa or India, it will be in English.

Wrong, as you won't get far with English in former French and Portuguese colonies.
BTW 30% in USA speak Spanish, with Hispanics the fastest growing part of the population.

Tequila Ranger wrote:The package my Tesseract Vault came in, which is using the newer style of packaging, has product descriptions in English and no less than 6 other dirty* foreign languages, which I'm guessing are French, German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese and at least one of the Chinese dialects.
(..)
Perhaps the image Kroothawk and the GW site is currently using is just a mock-up of the packaging, as the product(s) within have yet to be released?.

This change starts with September releases. Just check all new blisters and boxes end of the week.

Allod wrote:This thread has probably run its course really, but sorry, "translated codexes and rulebooks ensure that nobody really gives a gak" simply isn't true anymore. Several Scrolls of Binding for Fantasy, Death from the Skies, and the 40k supplements (all containing rules and thus a little more than irrelevant hobby-content) were not translated anymore. Even the hardback mini rulebook, the large version of which is already translated, is only available in English. Two or three years ago this would have been unthinkable. So, the box issue probably has to be viewed in context.
(...)
I believe most posters making this "storm in the teacup" are less "OMG GW SO HATES GERMANY!" and more 1.) "Why would they continue to scale-down language support?" and 2.) "Did they think about the possible consequences?"

This is a good summary. BTW German names are just an example as one of the biggest markets they offend for no obvious reason and with obvious disadvantages. Chinese and Japanese are removed as well, and both use a different script.

Allod wrote:

 mattyrm wrote:
About twenty people have said it, so can we just draw a line under it and combine all of their posts with one phrase?

Mountains out of molehills, storms in teacups, translated codexes and rulebooks ensure that nobody really gives a gak about one line on a box, and Kroothawk is about as impartial with regard to GW as Grand Ayatollah Sistani is about Religious preference.

This thread has probably run its course really, but sorry, "translated codexes and rulebooks ensure that nobody really gives a gak" simply isn't true anymore. Several Scrolls of Binding for Fantasy, Death from the Skies, and the 40k supplements (all containing rules and thus a little more than irrelevant hobby-content) were not translated anymore. Even the hardback mini rulebook, the large version of which is already translated, is only available in English. Two or three years ago this would have been unthinkable. So, the box issue probably has to be viewed in context.

In my group we have an Iyanden player and a Black Legion player. Both will not buy the supplements in English. I realize you don't care, and neither do we in our group, but GW should care, because they've lost two sure sales. Anecdotal evidence and all, but still.

Also, GW seems to be beginning to fracture their player base considering all the arguments I've witnessed over Death from the Skies at local tournaments, the point of which being the difficulty to solve rules disputes when one side doesn't understand the English wording and the arbiter is less than trustworthy because he's only semi-fluent himself. Yes, those concerns are probably unfounded, but does it really pay for GW to create such arguments in the first place?

Finally, the point has already been made, but what's so difficult to understand about this:

John is 13 years old and wants to start tabletop gaming. His local store carries two games. One choice is Infinity, which in his parallel universe has the core rules in English, but most expansions (which he is told are used regularly by some players in his area) are only in Spanish. Also, all the unit names on the boxes/blisters are Spanish, too, and mean nothing to him. The other choice is Warmachine, where all the materials are in English and he has already taken a fancy to the "Hammersmith" Warjack because it looks and SOUNDS cool.

Which choice is he more likely to make?

And if you were a company trying to sell to John, which publishing model would you copy?

I believe most posters making this "storm in the teacup" are less "OMG GW SO HATES GERMANY!" and more 1.) "Why would they continue to scale-down language support?" and 2.) "Did they think about the possible consequences?"

Good post, I just find the bit about Infinity misleading, as the rules, units and books are also available in English, not Spanish only.

 Kroothawk wrote:

Doesn't look to me like a certified poll on 5/6 of mankind, if they find Chinese or English easier to learn. Not even close.
Small detail: Many South East Asia countries have a Chinese minority active in trade, e.g. Malaysia and Indonesia.

Hence, the sinosphere. India has 150 million English speakers already, you think they're all going to learn Chinese too? Or do you think they'll deal with the 50 million Chinese people who speak English?

Do you know how many Chinese speakers there are in India? I can't even find any data on it, let alone how many Africans speak Chinese.

Wrong, see Kyrillic (and Greek) alphabet. Most Eastern Europe countries use Kyrillic.

Ohh you're being needlessly pedandic. Okay, the important parts of Europe all use the Latin alphabet, and Eastern languages are a lot closer to English than they are to Chinese.

Unless you're going to reply suggesting that a Russian would find it easier to learn Chinese than English, don't bother replying.

Wrong, as you won't get far with English in former French and Portuguese colonies.

You will actually. I work with people from those former colonies and English is rather popular.

Are you familiar with the concept of a Lingua Franca? Or do you seriously think that someone in Angola is going to do business with a Russian businessman in Russian, a Chinese businessman in Chinese and a Pakistani businessman in Urdu? They'd all communicate with each other in English.

BTW 30% in USA speak Spanish, with Hispanics the fastest growing part of the population.

As long as we're sprouting pointless facts, I just had a haircut! Therefore my point is valid.

I demand to know why GW is ignoring Esperanto damn it!

I had four year of french in school, all I can do is ask for the directions to the Eifel Tower and what time it is - and I probably won't know what the hell the nice French person I'm asking is responding. I can't even start guess what the description of unit on GW is supposed to mean.

Most of the players I play don't speak English well, because they either
1) are too young and haven't had a lot of English in school.
2) are too old and were in school before absolutely everybody had to take English one way or another.
3) didn't care about English back in school and failed to pick up any of it.

On top of that you have a lot of people who kind of understand English but have difficulties with complicated words and grammar. GW fudging their grammar more often than not, missing out on their punctuation and using lots of figures of speech doesn't exactly help it. Not everyone went to school in an English-speaking country like I did, so most people do a Google-translator-style translation of the English rules and obviously come to completely different conclusions than a native English speaker.

Every other German, Austrian or Swiss poster I've seen on this forum is a lot better in English than your average German WH40k player. And by a lot, I mean orks to eldar.

 Alkasyn wrote:
Good post, I just find the bit about Infinity misleading, as the rules, units and books are also available in English, not Spanish only.

Thanks. Regarding Infinity: Since some people seem a bit hung up on the whole "everybody can speak English" theme, I took a previous poster's idea of "What IF Infinity was in Spanish?" to illustrate what the situation German teenagers might find themselves in would look like to an English-speaking teenager.

Do you have a source for "gw fudging their grammar more often than that"? Or is that just another one of those "gw don't proof read codexes" statements?

 Malika2 wrote:

 adhuin wrote:

 Malika2 wrote:

So do you guys call Spiderman 'hämähäkki mies'?

Comics & Characters name is Hämähäkkimies in Finland, the movie titles go by dual titles of "Spider-Man – Hämähäkkimies".
Real names like Peter Parker is/was still Peter Parker, most of the hero names were translated, with few exceptions.

EDIT: Looks like the comics nowadays have Dual titles of "Spider-man - Hämähäkkimies" as well.

Dear God, that's awful!

How so? Descriptive names tell lot about the character and that is lost, if the target audience doesn't understand their meaning.
Whether it is Spider-Man, Great Unclean One Or Troll Slayer.