My first post here, since I don't tend to write a lot, but I guess it might help someone :)

Like many others I was bothered by the dubbing so much I couldn't bear playing it with the English dub.
Since my German is not nearly good enough to play it in the original, it was either German audio with English subtitles or nothing - which would have been a shame.

So I hacked around the file formats a bit, and there were actually some tools available that let you edit the Vissionaire Studio file format used in Daedalic Entertainment games, and with some additonal fiddling I managed to make them work with the German language version of a new beginning and replace all the German text inside the game with English.

If there's enough interest, I think I can make a simple tool that could patch the German version files and make it essentially a subtitle-only English localization, but I have two concerns:

1. I'm not sure if I can distribute the XML file containing the translated English text without copyright violation. It shouldn't be a big deal, since this file is virtually useless without the game, but you never know...

2. The graphic novel scenes are actually video files, and you can either have the German videos (with German text and German audio) or the English videos (with... you guess). I've tried combining the audio from the German version with the video from the English version, but IIRC I had some synchronization problems. Making it work requires some manual editing, and I guess I'd have to make a package containing the video files themselves, since a patch won't work here.

So before I go on and try to make something, is someone actually interested in this project?

I am.

Me too. I couldn't finish 'The Whispered World' because of Sadwic's awful whining voice. I don't want that to happen again.
So please, count me in :)

If you want to be completely safe, distribute a diff not the whole file.

Sorry for the late reply.
It's good to know that people are interested in this work.
I guess this is going to be my project for this weekend. I thought about distributing the diff, but I can't avoid copyright problems with distributing a straight diff, since the English translation text itself (which is going to be part of the diff) is also copyrighted. The only way to completely avoid it is to distribute a tool that would require you to have both language copies installed, and merge the text from the English version into the German version. But this sounds like too much hassle, and I'm quite sure it would cause unexpected compatibility problems. So I'll probably just distribute a the original file or a binary diff, and hope it's fair enough (since it's useless without the German version of the game).

Something interesting happened when I've tried to check the patch today.
The patch that worked not a long time ago failed, so I've checked the original and noticed the latest version of A New Beginning that I've downloaded from GOG is actually a unified installer that lets you choose any Speech and Subtitle language you want out of the available translations!

Obviously this is much nicer than my patch, so I just have to thank GOG and Daedalic Entertainment for listening to our complaint and creating a version that finally makes this adventure game worthy (and lets us play it without cringing). Way to go!

Of course I still have the translation tools, so as I go on to play other games on my backlog, I may need to make use of them again. This time I promise to publish my work immediately. :)