Semi-automated content translation is coming to Scandinavian Wikipedias | Hacker News Reader

Semi-automated content translation is coming to Scandinavian Wikipedias

blog.wikimedia.org

39 pointsmbrubeck16 comments

These languages so similar you can hold a conversation speaking Norwegian while someone else is speaking Swedish or Danish right back at you.

Great test case though as they build an infrastructure to do this with other languages eventually.

Talk for yourself.... :) some things are similar some are not.

The title says Semi-automated what is semi about it the entire article seams to imply fully automated translation.

Are you Scandinavian? I used to date a Norwegian and learned the language decently well. I'll second the OP and note that knowing Norwegian I can pretty much read Swedish and Danish at the same level as Norwegian. I also experienced Swedes and Danes speaking their respective languages to Norwegians (sometimes people would just switch to English too). It seems like Norwegians understand Swedes and Danes better than the other way around, but the written languages are pretty easy to understand even for someone like me who isn't that good at any of them.

Danish can be pretty terribly actually. Around here people say Danish is not a language but an impediment ( and I fully expect them to laugh at Norwegians too. Norwegians are spoiled brats for a start ;-)

Given some practice, you don't actually need that much time until you find it's rather ok.

But yes. Danish is probably the hardest to understand, and particularly speak properly, especially some dialects.

Some Norwegian dialects are quite hard too, but there are some rather incomprehensible dialects in Sweden as well.

The Danish queen speaks perfect Danish AND Swedish by the way, as her mother was Swedish. I think she is probably unique in that way, as you more or less have to change your whole personality to get rid of the Swedish accent when trying to speak Danish in a relaxed way :-)

Norwegian is the common denominator as we were occupied by the Danish (and effectively adopted Danish for writing) and were then traded to the Swedes.

The three languages fit well with the quote about "a language is a dialect with a flag and a navy".

I think you need to learn about 200 words that are confusing or have a different meaning between Danish, Norwegian, Nynorsk and Swedish... http://www.langsites.com/FalseEDNS.htm

Some examples in the list are probably less significant than it looks as many words are similar to words that are understandable but a bit outdated.

Then there is different spelling of nearly all words, and slightly different grammar and word-order, although all languages are quite tolerant to some artistic reordering.

Thanks for the list! I'm a Norwegian myself and have been working in an environment where we have about 10% swedes (including my direct boss), and I have learned a lot of these.

But having it all in one place will be great, it's also emailed to the rest of the company I work at.

> The title says Semi-automated what is semi about it the entire article seams to imply fully automated translation.

Each machine translation is proofread and edited by a human before publication.

Traveling in Sweden I was amazed at how products would have instructions where whole sentences really only had two or three words different in the different Scandinavian languages so only those words were translated, inline, separated by slashes.

It would be like having bilingual English/French text that went "Hello/Bonjour! Welcome to our home/maison!"

So, the feasibility of semiautomated translation doesn't come as a great surprise!

It's much more common for Norwegian and Danish to share a sentence, and Swedish to have its own.

You can see this labelling on many products sold in Europe, like cosmetics, processed foods, and some electronics.

> Wikipedia readers thus become accustomed to searching in English, and not seeing the knowledge that exists in their neighboring countries.”

As we should be? Wikis work best at scale, and diluting the content between different languages helps nobody.

Especially us scandinavians have no excuse for not just using (or especially contributing to) the english version instead.

Language encodes a lot of culture. How does one not inadvertently dilute this aspect?

They're probably going to dilute it but I think they just want to know how many Romans died at Cannae or whatever.

There are a lot of articles that a noteworthy on Danish Wikipedia but not on English. There are many aspects of many things that are relevant to a Swedish population but not a Vietnamese.

> There are a lot of articles that a noteworthy on Danish Wikipedia but not on English. There are many aspects of many things that are relevant to a Swedish population but not a Vietnamese.

You could have something like regional portals, without effectively restricting access to only people from that region.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com