översättning
Apr. 13th, 2011 09:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacYes, I know I have some friends who speak Swedish. But I wasn't going to ask them to translate this: it's rather long and rather abstruse and more than a bit loopy. The Swedes I know who've actually read it just roll their eyes and prefer not to talk about it. So I was going to have to read it for myself.
It was over a decade ago that I managed to lay hands on these two books. Sometime, long ago in the quiet of the world, when there was less noise and more time, I typed the whole of the first one into the computer. I have no memory of doing it all, but I must have, because here are the files. (The challenge of typing Swedish is the diacritics, which come in three varieties: å, ä, and ö. Rather than handling each instance individually, I substituted digits and executed a global change on the finished file.) My aim at the time had been to run it through a primitive Swedish-to-English translating program. I tried it on a sample and it did not work well, and only part of that was due to a truly appalling number of typographical errors in the input, which is probably inevitable when you have no idea how to spell what you're typing.
However, today we have Google Translate and Swedish is on its menu, which is not true of a lot of other online translators. I found the old files while I was going through old diskettes. I cleaned them up. I ran them through the program. I checked the spelling of anything it couldn't find or that seemed a true non-sequitur. I ran them through the progrma again. And ... it works pretty well. I can more than get the gist of it. At times it's even genuinely idiomatic.
And ... it's about what I thought. Only more so. Now I have to think about the second book. And about talking about what I've read.
It was over a decade ago that I managed to lay hands on these two books. Sometime, long ago in the quiet of the world, when there was less noise and more time, I typed the whole of the first one into the computer. I have no memory of doing it all, but I must have, because here are the files. (The challenge of typing Swedish is the diacritics, which come in three varieties: å, ä, and ö. Rather than handling each instance individually, I substituted digits and executed a global change on the finished file.) My aim at the time had been to run it through a primitive Swedish-to-English translating program. I tried it on a sample and it did not work well, and only part of that was due to a truly appalling number of typographical errors in the input, which is probably inevitable when you have no idea how to spell what you're typing.
However, today we have Google Translate and Swedish is on its menu, which is not true of a lot of other online translators. I found the old files while I was going through old diskettes. I cleaned them up. I ran them through the program. I checked the spelling of anything it couldn't find or that seemed a true non-sequitur. I ran them through the progrma again. And ... it works pretty well. I can more than get the gist of it. At times it's even genuinely idiomatic.
And ... it's about what I thought. Only more so. Now I have to think about the second book. And about talking about what I've read.
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no subject
Date: 2011-04-15 06:15 am (UTC)