Cimorene

A little while ago, my desktop computer at work was still running Windows 10, in Finnish, but the greeting screen before you sign in was a new photo from Bing every day and in the top left it said "Like what you see?" and you could click to help its algorithm tune to your preferences over time.

I installed all the available updates, upgraded to Windows 11, and installed all the available updates again. Then I changed the system language to Swedish.

When the computer restarted it said in the top right corner "Som bilden du ser?" (This is 'Like what you see?' word for word, using - incorrectly - the word that means like/as.) I took a photo of it to show Wax and make fun of.

Two days later when I got to work and signed in, it had corrected itself and said "Gillar du bilden du ser?" instead, which was what it meant to say all along.

A couple of possible explanations for this series of events occur to me:

• The Swedish regionalization of the program was new, and they pushed an update using a machine translation because they hadn't had time for a human translator yet. Then they fixed it when their translator came back from vacation.



• It's been incorrect for... however long, but some Swedish speakers who are more used to Windows than I am actually managed to find the feedback button and report the incorrect translation as a bug. I did glance around for it, but I didn't go as far as googling.



• One of our phones, even though they are both Android, was background eavesdropping when we walked the dog and I told Wax about the problem and the AI managed to parse it out and report it to Microsoft and they fixed it. Okay, so this is maybe less likely, but we are living in the future...

So I was translating this Teen Wolf RPF (Hoechlin/O'Brien obvs) from Spanish for waxjism's benefit on Friday night, because it really wasn't fair the way I was rhapsodizing about how it made me squirm in delight but she couldn't read it. (To be clear, I didn't squirm in delight because of its literary genius - it was really good and adorable and in a literary sense, slightly lyrical and beautifully paced and sizzling with US- and Emotional T, but those things alone aren't enough to prompt squirming - but because it kept hitting my fic kinks and, perhaps more importantly, I was pretty much dying to read some RPS about those dudes already when I found it.) (I did get permission from the author, so I will eventually post the result. No sense in wasting 4 or 5 hours' work.)

But the thing is that the dictionary I was having to rely way too much on translated farfullar as "gabble" first (followed by splutter, stammer, jabber, etc), and so that unfortunately stuck in my head, and - have you noticed that 'gabble' is possibly the world's least sexy verb? Or not quite, but at least one of the least sexy dialogue tags I can think of. It might be because of similarity to 'gobble' or just a simple matter of phonetics, but it sounds kind of ridiculous and embarrassing, and it kept coming up in these long twisty complex sentences, because her characterization of Dylan is quite Stilesy, and... yeah. Brain-cringe, every single time.

And also, who actually says 'gabble', anyway? Surely it shouldn't have been the first translation.

Continued from here. I realized belatedly that there was another potential stopping place partway through and waxjism was anxious that I post as soon as possible "because I like seeing bexless laugh", so. Part 3/3 is only 10 pages, so it should be up soon.

Part 2/3

( 18 1300x1100px jpgs with translations alongside )

So I spent quite a few hours this evening hunting down the story in which Loki and Heimdal fight in the form of seals over Freyja's magical necklace, Brisingamen. I saw brief, tantalizing mentions of turning into a seal and I was dying for all the details because that sounds like a hilariously cracktastic myth, even more so than a lot of the other ones about Loki.

In short, though, there isn't much detail to be had. :/ ( i.e. ) I found one Danish translation from the 20s, but none in Norwegian, Swedish, or English, so therefore I've translated the two relevant verses myself¹.

from Húsdrápa²

2.
The guardian of the rainbow bridge
journeyed to Singasteinn
with Fárbauti's son,
shameless slyⁱ Loki.

3.
Heimdal, the victorious seal,
son of nine mothers,
is already holding
the wondrous Brisingamen.

So basically "the victorious seal" is the best epithet ever. (And I wasn't kidding about details being scarce, although there's a bit more in the Skald section of the Prose Edda under 'Heimdal' and 'Loki'.)

Also I really like to imagine Loki changing into a seal exclusively in order to sit and gloat over his stolen treasure. "What's great at clapping in glee? I know! Seals! They're practically made for clapping. I've never been a seal before..."


( footnotes )

I still have a cold. Last night I importuned Wax to make me some instant cauliflower soup, and then was basically unable to taste it, so it was like a gradually cooling gelatinous kind of... slimy... thing... and it ended up kind of gross and I threw the remainder of it away this morning.

Last night after translating the text from about 50 pages of graphs, I suddenly realised that "Ing." didn't stand for "Ingen" (No, none) as I had thought because that made no sense. I scoured Wikipedia and Google and finally went through all the Ing- words in Wax's dictionary to no avail. ENGINEERS. They write their reports just as if nobody but them is ever going to read them and send them off to be translated by someone who doesn't actually know that much about their particular sort of jargon (I mean, steam turbines, it's a slightly specialised area). I finally left the "Ing." there, just like the other Mystery Acronyms and Abbreviations, and the non-Swedish-speaking engineers who are doubtless going to peruse it at the other end can worry about it. I do feel a bit guilty, though. But at least I'm finished! I'll let Brother Windows say it:



Oh, and one more thing. Our latest Threadless order (Gay Pride and Stabby McKnife) hasn't even arrived yet so I guess I can't order this new t-shirt that's made of awesome yet: Identifying Flying Objects. (STEALTH BOMBER! Flying carpet! Lost Boy!)

Whoever made this translation memory saved "Tag 3 för 2" as "Take 2 Pay for 3".

It shouldn't have to be said, but unless you are a lolcat:

SINGULAR SUBJECT, SINGULAR VERB. PLURAL SUBJECT, PLURAL VERB.

...And if you are a lolcat, you should not be translatin at all.

I think the most maddening part of the Project That Pissed Me the Fuck Off is, okay, the reason you're not supposed to translate OUT of your native language is that you want the most natural, native-speaker-like translation.

That is to say, it's assumed that everyone has a more nuanced understanding of his or her native language. Which means that the theoretical advantage of having a translator translate out of their native language would be that their grasp of the source would be better.

I mean, so Norwegian Girl should theoretically have understood nuances of the Norwegian original that I might not have, if there were non-standard usages, colloquialisms, grammatical ambiguities - if the sentence could have multiple meanings or had a subtle mistake that makes it mean something wrong, like a misplaced modifier for example, then a native speaker should just naturally grasp it where I might not.

But Norwegian Girl's understanding of Norwegian is inferior to mine. And I don't actually speak Norwegian. I keep running across mistranslations that in no way can be attributed to her misunderstanding of how to form correct sentences in English, though she certainly does misunderstand this. I keep fixing sentences because she actually just didn't understand what the original sentence was saying - where she put the modifiers in the wrong place.

For example, here's her translation:

For Messages that are not to be stored in PROGRAM, a user can be designated who will be able to delete it or not.

This sentence is grammatically correct aside from the incorrect capitalisation, although the end is clunky and would be rephrased, if it were what the sentence actually meant. But it isn't. What the sentence actually means is:

For messages that are not to be stored in PROGRAM, one can indicate whether the user will be able to delete them or not.

Confusion is introduced by the way Norwegian doesn't use 'the' and 'a(n)' the same way English does, which means when you read the Norwegian sentence you have to grasp from context whether the case is general (referring to all users - which it is) or specific (talking about a hypothetical individual user). The sentence means that you can set, for any and all individual users, whether or not they have permission to delete messages - not that you can pick any single user you like and enable them alone to delete. There is no 'who will be able to' construction, or anything like it, in the source. And this is simply one example.

So I'm not just correcting mistakes due to her wholly inadequate English, I'm not just correcting inadvertent 'That Doesn't Mean What You Think It Means', but I'm also, for proofreader pay - 1/6th of her pay - compensating for the fact that she does not actually have sufficient reading comprehension skills in her native language to understand the import of the document in the first place, let alone to translate that meaning for anyone else.

Yeah, remember how I said that I had had 5 hours of sleep out of the past two days before last night? The culprit was about 30 pages of contract documents from the Norwegian police force, but yesterday 9 am was just the intermediate deadline; the whole project was just half done. The third document is due tomorrow and the fourth one the day after.

So after sleeping basically all day yesterday I drank a lot of tea, curled up with a hot water bottle (not for cramps, but because my feet are chronically cold and while it's definitely ~AUTUMN~ outside [someone should make a raining-on-the-text generator like that sparkly text generator, because that's how AUTUMN would look in Finland], the radiators haven't come on inside yet) and read an entire Heyer novel (Venetia, a new favourite which I had to my delight never read before). And then I slept for another twelve hours. And woke up this morning to the phone ringing for the automated deadline reminder service ("We ah... urrrgently... awate-ing... ur... translayshun...") and scrambled half-awake and full of panic out of bed to turn on the computer and check the deadline.

So, I didn't miss the deadline, but the incompetent fools (nothing new there) have set the staggered deadlines in the instructions as the 1st, 3rd and 4th, but listed the overall translator deadline as the 2nd (ie TODAY, in 20 minutes actually) in the computer, which is obvs. where that charmingly-Dutch-accented automaton gets its informashuns from. While I'm up, though, I might as well do as much of this as possible. Norwegian! Poliiiiiiice! I love the Finnish police and their cute little rompers, but if anyone could be awesomer than them it would have to be the Norwegian ones, because I mean, Norway. Even Iceland couldn't be that funny. And check out the logo:

Look at his little AXE! Even cooler than the Finnish police emblem (which is a knife with the head of a snarling lion for the hilt).