The French/German/Spanish/etc. for Mph?

(For my Unity racing game...)

So Mph is quite a common acronym for "miles per hour". Which is fine for English speaking countries.

Obviously in Europe they mostly use "kilometres per hour". But the word for hour is different in these languages so it won't always be "kph".

I've tried using Google Translate on "kph" to no avail.

Thus I'm a bit stumped how to translate kph into different languages. It must be a common thing in racing games to use this. Do you know of any sources where I might find how to translate "kph" into various languages. It must be on the speedometer of cars of every country so speedometer manufacturers are some people who would experience this problem too!

 

km/h

 

the h in km/h is for the latin word horae

 

Right so I put "km/h" and "hour" into Google translate and I get, for example:

French: km/h hour=heure
German: km/h hour = Stunde
Swedish: km/t hour=timme
Polish: km/h hour =godzina
Thai: กม. / ชม. hour = ชั่วโมง

What I don't get is the German and Polish ones as the "h" isn't the same as the word for "hour". Are they correct?

Interesting the Swedish one translates as km/t with a "t".

I suppose its pretty arbitrary. No real rules to it.

Thanks anyway for the tip of writing "km/h".

Another question will Americans understand what "km/h" is? Or would they prefer "mph" in a racing game?

 

Your best bet would be to use the EU/US/... Speed Limit sign and put the speed in there...

things like that is one reason why I'm waiting for Unity uGUI

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_limit

 

Just be sure to make it an option to switch between mph / km/h in the settings, I don't want to get stuck with mph just because I choose english as my language.

 

Although we say "Kilometer pro* Stunde**" in german, km/h (which is a unit symbol) is right. See this german wikipedia entry about it. You might also take a look at the english one here.

*pro = per
**Stunde = Hour

 

Yes, they are correct. km/h is the official SI-Unit name.
It's nothing special to use things like h for the hour in other languages - when you look for example at the internationally used formula for the block coefficient:

Cb = V / (Lwl * B * T)

Officially the B stands for "Breite" (wide or beam) and the T is for "Tiefgang" (draft / draught) while Lwl is for "length at waterline" - a crude mix of german and english

 

Even the Chinese use EU speed limit sign:

https://www.google.com/search?q=chi...UBoeoyASY1IKgDg&ved=0CEUQsAQ&biw=1123&bih=958

 

That's not a EU speed limit sign it's just the unit used world wide. The USA is the only country that has not switched to the metric system (except some tiny islands) - most funny is their use of fahrenheit a unit introduced by a german while germans and the rest of the world use Celsius which fits perfectly to Kelvin.

 

Ah but I see in Sweden they DO use km/t so Google Translate got it right! That's good to know. Thanks guys.

 

If you would just use km/h in your game then you would help the world a little to get rid of the idiotic mix up of units which can be extremely costly: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter

 

Metric is good as saying EU. Metrics started in France in the 19th century and the official measures are still kept there if I remember right. Canada still has a mix of sign styles although they use metrics.

 

But the EU is the European Union and not Europe. The EU creates laws for the member states. So saying "China uses the EU speed limit sign" would imply that the speed limit signs were changed by the EU in the past which is not true. It's just the usual speed sign around the world and has absolutely nothing to do with the EU. Most of the countries used the metric system before there were cars. (except the commonwealth and USA).

 

To be fair to Fahrenheit, it is a good scale for weather, which is what people are usually measuring temperature for. Generally I don't care about moving to the metric system unless I'm working at 32th of an inch.

 

What makes Fahrenheit a good scale for weather?

At 0°C water freezes (pretty useful if you want to know if the snow melts)
0°C-10°C too cold
15°C It's OK
20°C really nice weather
25°C minimum temperature for a day to count as a summer day here
30°C hot (usually ideal weather for the beach)
35°C this is getting dangerous
40°C extremely hot
At 100°C water cooks

usually winter temperatures are below 10°C, spring between 10° and 20° and summer 20°-30°

What makes fahrenheit superior for weather? 100°F is kind of body temperature… water freezes at -17.8°F, water cooks at around 212°F

 

Question 2

OK. I'm stuck on translations again. This time I'm trying to translate "1st", "2nd", "3rd", "4th","5th","6th". As in "You are in 3rd place". Is there an equivalent in other langauges? Is is just to show you what place you are in the race. What might really be helpful is to find a racing game that you can choose the language. Then I could just copy these things.

This is what Google Translate is giving me:

French 1st = 1er
German 1st = 1.
Spanish 1st = Primero
Italian 1st = 1 °
Russian 1st = 1-й

It's a nightmare! Most of them seem to translate just to "1"

 

It is definitely correct for German and Spanish.
But in Switzerland/Germany/whatever they usually use the english version 1st. That wouldn't really matter.
Don't forget to conjugate the Spanish "Primero". 1st place would translate to "Primer puesto".

 

There isn't a common method to these languages (as far as I know), but you could write it as "1/6" on the GUI. If the number reads "6/6" when the player starts at the back of the race and changes as the player overtakes or is overtaken by other cars, the player would probably figure it out.

 

What's the problem? A combination of numbers and letters is quite unusual in languages. As it was mentioned before 1. for 1st is absolutely correct in german.

BTW: don't try to do the translation for your game with google or any other tool. This won't work.

 

Because that's kind of what it's calibrated to. 100 was the hottest it got that year and 0 was the coldest. Where I live, in the middle of the US, I expect a couple days above 100 and couple days below 0.

Back on topic, just use english nomenclature. Chances are the little bits of text you're using are going to be familiar to them anyway.

 

Spanish for kph is "Kilómetros por hora" (km/h).
And mph = "Millas por hora."

 

BTW. I invented a new scale for temperature called the P scale which uses the best of both worlds!


0°P = 0°C
100°P = 100°F

You get the P scaled by multiplying the Celcius by 45/17. So in the P scale

Room temperature = 55.5°P. A nice warm day is about 50°P. Boiling water is 264.7°P. Absolute zero is -723°P.