Hi!

I was wondering Scawen, I've been learning Northern Sami (in Finnish it means Pohjoissaame) for some time now, which is by far the most popular of the Sami Languages. The official name is Davvisámegiella (or just Sámegiella when speaking about Sámi languages itself). I could have a possibility to start translating LFS from English to Northern Sami language. However, I know it will definitely take some time from me to do that.

You can find more information about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_S%C3%A1mi

However, I've found some possible issues about this:

1) Can you tell, will the new version have so many new or updated translation strings, that does it make sense for me to actually start translating it? Or should I wait for the new version that would have those updated translation strings?

2) There are only 25000 speakers of that language in the whole world, so it may be quite difficult to find any testers. There are speakers in Finland, Norway and Sweden, but I don't know if any of them play LFS

3) There are some special characters used in Sámi keyboard. I'm wondering does LFS support all of those characters. You can find it here: https://divvun.no/en/keyboards/layout-sme.html - and also from the Wikipedia page here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A1mi_languages

- These are the special characters: Áá, Čč, Đđ, Ŋŋ, Šš, Ŧŧ, Žž
- And these characters are replaced: C, F, Q, W, X, Y, Z and Å

Of course loanwords can still use those replaced characters, for example cars and tracks name would still use those characters that are normally replaced in Northern Sami.

4) Is there anyway I can add a new language into LFS for testing? Or do I have to replace one of the existing languages with that?

5) If it's necessary, how much of the game would I need to translate before this language could be accepted into LFS? I know I would need to translate at least the help-file but do I need to translate every single translation string?

DISCLAIMERS:
1) I will not guarantee this translation project will actually be completed due to those aforementioned issues. It will definitely take some time from me to actually do it. I would first want to know, does it make sense for me to even start translating it into that language

2) Only the Northern Sámi would be added, no other Sámi languages. Sorry for those 2 people who speak Ter Sámi (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ter_S%C3%A1mi)

3) There are small differences between countries that use Northern Sámi. For example, some words may be typed differently in Norway than in Finland. I would use the Finnish version of course

En halua liikaa kusta muroihin jos jo asiaan on ehditty nähdä vaivaa, mutta pakko kyllä kysyä että onko tuossa mitään järkeä lähteä kääntämään peliä kielelle josta ei ole varmuutta, että pelaavatko äidinkielenään saamea käyttävät edes kyseistä peliä?

Epävirallisen käännöksen ymmärtäisin kyllä, mutta ei tuo mielestäni takaa virallista asemaa listaan, kun tuolla on kieliä millä on miljoonia ja jopa miljardi natiivia puhujaa, joita ei ole lisätty LFS:n kielilistaan. (Englannilla toki suurin osa pärjää, ja niin veikkaisin myös saamelaistenkin pärjäävän joko sillä tai toisella äidinkielellään.)

Translated the quote by DeepL:

Quote from nikopdr :

I don't want to piss on the cereal too much if effort has already been put into the matter, but I have to ask whether it makes any sense to translate the game into a language when there is no certainty that native Sámi speakers even play the game in question?

I would understand an unofficial translation, but in my opinion, that doesn't guarantee an official status on the list when there are languages with millions or even billions of native speakers that haven't been added to the LFS language list. (Of course, most people can get by with English, and I would guess that the Sami people can also get by with either that or their native language.)

I haven't done really much about it, because I want to know first, is it even possible to do it in the first place.

About the amount of users LFS has:
- 145214 users that have set their country as Finland
- 17882 users that have set their country as Sweden
- 12397 users that have set their country as Norway

And I would say almost all of these users are indeed from they country they told they're from. There are about 17000-18000 speakers in Norway, 5000-6000 in Sweden and 2000 in Finland. So, one could assume as since there are more Northern Sámi speakers in Norway than registered LFS users from that country, there is a good chance of a Northern Sámi speaking people playing LFS.

About that does it make sense: Scawen himself has said that he is always open for LFS being as accessible as possible. https://www.lfs.net/forum/post/1936125#post1936125 - so it is something that would be nice to have, but is not essential for the game.

One reason why some of those popular languages with millions of speakers, like Hindi and Arabic don't have translation in LFS is simply because:
- With Hindi, it does have special characters that are not currently supported in LFS
- With Arabic, it does have special characters and the text is right-to-left - those are not supported in LFS

Scawen has told that he would be interested to see how he can add the support to those languages, after the graphical updates and tire physics have been finished.

With Northern Sámi, it does have special characters, but it should be possible with ASCII to use alternative versions of those characters. For example, with letter "Đ", we can use Dh (or just D if there is no other choice) instead when you know you can't use D with stroke. I know that UTF+8, which LFS doesn't use or support at least yet, fully supports all Northern Sámi characters.