8 ms·

That is a great read/translate.

howard941 8y ago
Didn't it read as if translated by a native English speaker? I thought so too. Amazingly adept/scary, with only one really tiny niggle exception for the quoted "Uff" that transliterates better than it translates.
- caymanjim 8y ago
  I was halfway through before I thought, "this reads like it was written by an ESL author." I scrolled up to look at the author's name, and only then noticed that it was machine-translated. Amazing job on the translation. Also a good story.
- nso 8y ago
  The structure of Norwegian and English are closely related. Most times you end up with something legible by translating each word directly without accounting for context.
- lostmyoldone 8y ago
  The structure of the English was very good, but there was a few places where it seemed to translate Norwegian as if it was Swedish, and quite a few places where it seemed to "guess" what a word meant. In most cases it didn't loose much of the meaning, but the sentence translated as "It was even nicer that Mats himself, who was lying in the white coffin, had not met these people either." should be translated more like: "Even stranger was that Mats himself ..." or possibly "The only thing more strange was ..." Not fluent in Norwegian so I don't know for sure. But as a Swedish speaker I'm well aware that "rar" ( stem of rarere ) is not translated as nice, as it's one of the more common causes for miscommunication with out western neighbors. In Norwegian "rar" a false cognate with the Swedish "rar", which actually means nice. However, they likely also share common etymological roots, so are cognate and false cognate with each other simultaneously.
  - schoen 8y ago
    It's amazing to see what's happened to English "nice" itself over the history of the word https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nice https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nice I think technically in the case you describe the two words are true cognates, but with different meanings. Cognate means that they share an etymology, not necessarily that they share an etymology and a present-day meaning. Wikipedia distinguishes false friends from false cognates this way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_friend https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_friend

Didn't it read as if translated by a native English speaker? I thought so too. Amazingly adept/scary, with only one really tiny niggle exception for the quoted "Uff" that transliterates better than it translates.

caymanjim 8y ago
I was halfway through before I thought, "this reads like it was written by an ESL author." I scrolled up to look at the author's name, and only then noticed that it was machine-translated. Amazing job on the translation. Also a good story.
nso 8y ago
The structure of Norwegian and English are closely related. Most times you end up with something legible by translating each word directly without accounting for context.
lostmyoldone 8y ago
The structure of the English was very good, but there was a few places where it seemed to translate Norwegian as if it was Swedish, and quite a few places where it seemed to "guess" what a word meant. In most cases it didn't loose much of the meaning, but the sentence translated as "It was even nicer that Mats himself, who was lying in the white coffin, had not met these people either." should be translated more like: "Even stranger was that Mats himself ..." or possibly "The only thing more strange was ..." Not fluent in Norwegian so I don't know for sure. But as a Swedish speaker I'm well aware that "rar" ( stem of rarere ) is not translated as nice, as it's one of the more common causes for miscommunication with out western neighbors. In Norwegian "rar" a false cognate with the Swedish "rar", which actually means nice. However, they likely also share common etymological roots, so are cognate and false cognate with each other simultaneously.
- schoen 8y ago
  It's amazing to see what's happened to English "nice" itself over the history of the word https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nice https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nice I think technically in the case you describe the two words are true cognates, but with different meanings. Cognate means that they share an etymology, not necessarily that they share an etymology and a present-day meaning. Wikipedia distinguishes false friends from false cognates this way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_friend https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_friend