Friday

Fifa 12 will have Arabic audio



I was listening to the Saudi Gamer podcast and they announced the news that EA has chosen to give the game Fifa 12 Arabic audio commentary and menus. EA hired two actual soccer commentators, a Tunisian Issam Chawali (عصام الشوالي) and a Saudi Abdullah Alharbi (عبدالله الحربي). This choice makes sense as the Arab world is a huge market for all things soccer. I'm really excited about this step and I hope it sets a precedent for more video games to have audio in Arabic. I've always been jealous of people learning Japanese because they can augment their learning by playing a lot of video games in Japanese, but for Arabic you don't have that option. I might actually buy this game for my Xbox to learn some soccer jargon even though I'm definitely not a soccer fan. I'm sure it's more exciting than watching an actual game though :P.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

wow, he really massacred the مع السلامة

The Arabic Student said...

Yeah, sounded like "mal al salama". I can't blame him though. He probably has a lot of stuff to worry about with his job.

Anonymous said...

Blog article idea: sports vocabulary in Arabic? Things like "goal!", "amazing play there", "good pass from player x to y", etc!

Anonymous said...

This was really good, thanks for posting it. Also, i think it is a good idea too, the sports vocabulary.. go for it.. if you don't have more important things to worry about ;P

Anonymous said...

learning sports vocabulary is probably more useful than you think. i mean, if you really want to be hang out with arabs in a natural way and be accepted, what better way than by being able to talk about football/soccer properly in arabic?

HouariB said...

I remember a microsoft game (forgot the name) like starcraft but with different antique civilisation. The egyptian were speaking in arabic :)

The Arabic Student said...

Yeah, a sports vocab post would be good.

And HouariB, was it Age of Empires? I know if you played as the Arabs they would speak Arabic when you told your little guys to do stuff. Chopping wood and building and stuff.

Ελλάδα said...

I'm a pretty big FIFA fan. It's always been a flawed game in a lot of ways but typically EA tries to fix things. FIFA 12 has taken huge steps forwards in fixing things they destroyed in FIFA 11 but glanced over some huge issues and in typical EA fashion, broke the game in a lot of ways as well.

Frances said...

Before beginning to translate various soccer terms into Arabic, people ought to learn how they're used in the first place.