English Audio w/ Text in a different Language

If you prefer the original english audio / voices, but want to keep the text in your language, then this is the guide for you!

I found several suggestions on the forums how to achieve this, by just swapping the local_XY.pack files with the ones from your language and renaming it to local_en.pack. But unfortunately none of this suggestions worked for me.

You can achieve this though, but it's a little bit more work than a regular swap and rename. By extracting the said locale_XY.pack with the Pack File Manager and swapping the text files inside the pack files, you can combine the english voice with any text language.

Get the language files - local_xy.pack

First you have to get the english language pack file for the voices and the pack file of your preferred language for the text. This is simply done, by changing the language of Total War Shogun 2 (TWS2) in Steam.

You will get a language specific pack file with the language abbreviation as a suffix.
For example: local_en.pack for English, local_ge.pack for german, local_fr.pack for french and so on. For this guide, I will use German as an example. This means every time you see local_ge.pack in this guide, swap it with the language you want to use.

1. Right click on Total War Shogun 2 in your library > choose Properties...
   
2. Open the Language tab.
   
3. Choose the preferred language for your text. For this example, it's German.
   
4. Open the install directory of TWS2 by right clicking on Total War Shogun 2 in your library > Manage > Browse local files.
   
5. Open the data folder.
   
6. Make a new folder and copy the local_ge.pack file into the new folder .
   
7. Now repeat steps 1-5 and choose English as the language. You will get a local_en.pack.
   
8. Make a backup of local_en.pack.

Download and prepare Pack File Manager

Now you have to download and prepare "Pack File Manager" to open the .pack files.

1. Download Pack File Manager from here:
   https://sourceforge.net/projects/packfilemanager/
   
2. Extract the zip file and start it with PackFileManager.exe.
   
3. When starting it the first time, you will see multiple prompts with Please point to location of XYZ.
   
4. If XYZ is STW, choose the install folder of Total War Shogun 2.
   
5. If XYZ is something else than STW (e.g. TWH, ATW, R2TW), click Cancel.
   
6. Select Yes on the First Start window which says Looking for updated schema files for decoding DB files.
   
7. Under Game, check if STW is selected.
   
8. Under Options, select CA Packs Are Read Only, then choose I'm not afraid, coward!

Replace the text section of the language pack file

Now it's about time to put the text files of your language pack file into the english pack file.

1. If you didn't already start Pack File Manager --> Start it with PackFileManager.exe.
   
2. Don't forget to uncheck CA Packs Are Read Only under Options (see previous section).
   
3. Go to File > Open... and open the local_en.pack in the data folder of TWS2.
   
4. Select text in the list and push delete to remove it.
   
5. Go to File > Save to refresh the change.
   
6. Now left click local_en.pack in the list and go to Files > Add > From Pack...
   
7. Choose the local_ge.pack (or your language pack) which you got in the first section.
   
8. A new window opens. Double click on local_ge.pack to expand the list.
   
9. Right click once on text and click OK. This will import the text files into the english language pack.
   
10. Go to File > Save to refresh the change.
    
11. Exit the Pack File Manager.

Conclusion

There you go! You succesfully transferred the text files from your language file pack into the english language pack, which contains the english voices. Now Total War Shogun 2 should run with English voices and texts in your preferred language!

Have fun! :)