The Translation Crusade

The Translation Crusade is Swankest’s weird obsession with translating shitty Amnesia mods. Notable mostly for annoying modders for burying their mods on the front page of ModDB.

Modus Operandi

The default setting when creating mods allows anyone to attach files, which Swankest used to post his translations on original mod pages. That wouldn’t be an issue if not for the fact that uploading these translations bumped the mods to the top of the list, which not only is necroing (a practice considered retarded by forum users), but would often bury currently-developed mods.

To add insult to injury, Swankest translates absolutely everything, including complete trash that should have been left in the dumpster of history (he presumably does this to have more shit to spam on YouTube). Active creators obviously weren’t exactly happy, because now people checking out mods would see 10 year old garbage instead of seeing new cool stuff and cheering the creators on. As such, this practice was considered by some a yet another blow to an already dying community. To illustrate, imagine that a Scorn development blog of gets pushed off the recommended page because someone translated Bubzy3D to Czech.

Livaj explaining why this shit is annoying before moddbtards admitted to it

At some point someone suggested to put these translations on a single mod page, which Swankest did (“Amnesia Project Czech Translations” and a few others).

Translation quality

As to the translations themselves, Swankest primarily translates to from English to Czech. Anyone with more than 10 braincells would expect a translator to be at least fluent in both languages, however Swankest is not one of these people - he translates despite speaking broken English and having trouble understanding the material. One example often brought up by Sabatu is how he translated “getting fired” into “getting burned”.

Because of his lacking English skill, Swankest uses automatic translations and only proofreads the Czech results (ironically, this might actually produce better results than if he translated manually). What’s worst is that apparently he often doesn’t bother trying to understand the story he is translating. Needless to say, the end results are usually flimsy, in some cases producing entirely nonsensical versions of the original stories.

Non-Czech translations

Swankest also posts translations in: Russian, Turkish, French, Polish, Spanish, Hungarian and probably more. He’s been seen posting real translations made by other translators, as is the case with French and Russian.

The rest of the translations that Swankest posts are even less reputable. He credits some translators for the other languages, but at the moment it cannot be confirmed whether these are handmade; for example, his Polish translation of the main Amnesia campaign is clearly translated automatically without proofreading from a Polish speaker, as it contains subtle grammatical errors and robotic sentence structures. Funnily enough this translation doesn’t include the DLC and was created despite a much better translation already existing.

Lmao who gives a shit

Prolificness

Now for some context, to translate an Amnesia mod, he has to download the entire thing, locate the language file, extract the text while translating (the file contains English XML tags which mustn’t be translated, so he cannot just dump the entire content to Google translate) and then paste it back in the appropriate place. He has to do this dozens of times, as this is how many text entries mods usually have. Then make a download page for the translation, including an image thumbnail which he takes from the original mod.

Although half of the time he’s too lazy and reuses a screenshot of the main game menu.

He also records a playthrough of each translation (yes, he records the shame shitty mods multiple times just so that the text in the game footage is in different languages), presumably just after finishing the translations. At the moment of writing this, Swankest has over 300 translation files posted on ModDB, most of which get less than 10 downloads.

Other instances

Pretty much the exact same story applies to Alexei Panov, a Russian translator. He also flooded the main pages, eventually relegated the translations to a separate page and his translations also have been reported to be of poor quality.

There are also other people who made unsolicited translations:

• Oliver, an older German guy whose work is reportedly very decent
• Mangouste, a Frenchman

Unlike the previously mentioned people, they have the courtesy to first ask for permission. They also haven’t caused any annoyance, albeit Oliver was seen being pissed at the Bavarian Drama because it destroyed his work.