I was just sitting here in idle, and thought, could some of the translations into other languages possibly have "alternate" meanings or bad words snuck in, and because ScaViEr don't speak those languages, they could be getting thru undetected.
All I can say is that, Estonian translation is almost perfect, except pitting texts (Changing left front tyre, fuelling etc.) Anyway, I haven't got... any complaints about the language. Some folks are just crying about the fact, that they're used to English and everything seems so strange in estonian .
The other day i was sat on the toilet, thinking about some of the people on this forum, and how they think about the most retarded things known to man. Oh i wish some of them would get cast into a crevasse of fire.
I once thought of making an "Abusive English" translation that would say like "You w**ker. stop driving like a ****, you got a drivethrough, which it would be almost impossible for me to coerce Scawen in to including. So I didn't bother.
You could also switch the meaning of buttons around, for extra hilarity. It could automatically select this 'language' when you've been banned too many times. Oh the possibilities
I have no complaints about the dutch translation, although sometimes it seems like it's translated a bit too literally. I don't know why, but some things just come out wrong, although technically they're correct. I would just say it in another way.
I don't know if the Hungarian translation is good or not, I have only peeked at it, saw that our silly grammar makes short English texts long and cramped, then switched back to English. A minute of Hungarian LFS was enough for me
But I believe the translations are as good as they can possibly be because LFS fans translated them and I guess they didn't spare the effort.
There are several reasons why the translated text would be wrong/wierd. For example english is fairly simple compared to finnish where you have complex conjugations for pretty much every word.
There are size limits for the string which limit what you can put in there.
One string is combined of several different strings which in english is ok for both but translated to another language don't quite fit to both occasions.
The text string in english isn't always enough, you'd need to know the exact situation(s) it comes up to translate it correctly.
I don't get the point of this thread, I guess you thought Scavier made the translations themself using just a dictionary?
That's possible, but I believe not a case here. I've been in LFS for a long time, we at liveforspeed.ru had prepared most of our translation more than year before the patch was released. [edit: in january, 2004] So, having spent all these efforts and so much time, I value the results and own reputation very much. Only a complete freak or a casual person would commit such a thing. I think, Victor selected people not randomly.
No, I think anyone could do the translation. Their names are there in the language file I think, so they would have been stupid to do a prank translation.
The same problem for us. Also, there are no narrow cyrillic letters like "i", moreover, some are wider. In English some words are very short (like car, tire, rim, pit [a noun, a verb, we'd have a hundred forms for it!], wing, rear, front, left, right...). I had to deviate from the canonical words to make strings that would be short and look normally everywhere. The good side of this translation is that we *feel* what is there behind each string in LFS, and know what word to use.
K.David formally, yes, anybody could, but take into consideration what it means to any who participated in translation.
BTW, why don't you try to improve Hungarian translation? Just open LFS, open a text editor. Find a bug => find it in the text, correct, SHIFT+F5, go on. IIRC, it took about several hours for me (divided into 2 days-off) to translate the language file from scratch.