Donald Knuth celebrated his 80th birthday in Piteå | Hacker News Reader

Donald Knuth celebrated his 80th birthday in Piteå

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48 pointshenrik_w12 comments

Sounds like an interesting performance.

I have the feeling that George RR Martin talked too much with Donald Knuth.

Machine translation has become really, really good. I did not spot many mistakes.

Yes, it was understandable to this non-Swede. Here are phrases which stick out for me as not-quite-English (I'll ignore things where I thought the preposition was a bit odd, like "to his honor" instead of "in his honor".)

"At physical education they said it would be really difficult." . That should be a physics education, not? And that preposition is weird. Perhaps "Regarding a physics education, they .."

"yesterday the retired Stanford professor filled 80 years" - "filled"? He turned 80. Is this a Swedish idiom?

"We had specialist equipment" - perhaps "special equipment"? Is it for specialists to operate, or is it unusual equipment?

"the world's premier computerist." - I haven't heard the word "computerist" before. It's only been mentioned a few times in all of HN history (https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22computerist%22&sort=byPopul... and https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22computerist%22&sort=byPopul... )

"How does a computer do when it's going to search for something like when you googlar?" - Perhaps it's supposed to be "What does a computer do when it's going to search for something, like when you use Google?"

"when he began to study physics in the 1950s, he first happened on a computer." I think that "happened" should be "came across"?

"there would be a total of seven bands" - What is "bands"? Volumes?

"Now Donald Knuth writes on Part 4B" - I believe "Now Donald Knuth is writing Part 4B" is better.

"To make music of Revelation book he he dreamed about since the early 1960s" - I know what it's saying, but it's a very odd sentence.

"and stands in a fantastic hall" - The word "stands" sounds odd.

But again, yes, the machine translation here is quite good.

Yah most of your examples are either idioms ("filled"), Swedish homonyms ("band" in this context refers to volume), or simply word-for-word translation.

TIL (again) that context is still key when it comes to language/communication

Cheers

"happen" has a verb sense meaning "to encounter by chance" when followed by "on" or "upon", so "happened" is grammatically and idiomatically correct. All the other ones are weird, though :)

Ahh, yes. That was a mistake on my part.

"När du googlar" is literally "when you Google". Ironic, he could translate others but not himself ;). "Datavetare" would be more correctly translated as "computer scientist" and I'm surprised it doesn't do that. It's the literal translation, just like "naturvetare" means "natural scientist".

Might Google be doing this deliberately in order to prevent their name from becoming a generic trademark?

That is, quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_trademark , "Google has gone to lengths to prevent this process, discouraging publications from using the term 'googling' in reference to Web searches."

> "At physical education they said it would be really difficult." . That should be a physics education, not? And that preposition is weird. Perhaps "Regarding a physics education, they .."

Yes, but it's more that they are saying it about themselves. The meaning is basically the same as the previous sentence just expressed differently i.e. "People at the music school emphasized how easy it would be for me. People at the physics school said it would be really difficult".

> Is it for specialists to operate, or is it unusual equipment?

Unusual equipment.

> "How does a computer do when it's going to search for something like when you googlar?" - Perhaps it's supposed to be "What does a computer do when it's going to search for something, like when you use Google?"

"Googlar" is "(to) google" or maybe "googleing" with Swedish conjugation.

> "there would be a total of seven bands" - What is "bands"? Volumes?

Yes, in Swedish you can say "band" referring to the "band" of the book i.e. the binding. The meaning is volume.

> "and stands in a fantastic hall" - The word "stands" sounds odd.

I guess "sits" is more common in English.

"filled 80 years" is not an idiom, but simply a word-by-word translation of "turned 80".

One of the most important factor seems people contributions. Translation is really awful for less popular languages (even if one of the language is English).

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