Peter Sunde's request for clemency [Google translate] | Hacker News Reader

Peter Sunde's request for clemency [Google translate]

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44 pointskallus18 comments

> Thomas Bodström was summoned to the meeting in the White House and knew what it would mean to disobey. Sanctions against trade between the U.S. and Sweden within the framework of the World Trade Organization. Sweden could become a new Cuba.

This is news to me. Is there any publicly available evidence for this that I could read further on?

Sweden could not become a new Cuba.

Cuba is barely Cuba anymore.

The world is full of states who thumb their noses at WTO IP principles. None of them are as a result embargoed by the US.

He's using a lot of very strange wording in the original. Granted I was raised among immigrants in Sweden but the whole appeal reads very immature to me. But he starts out by saying he probably won't have it approved so it doesn't seem to matter. I would have put a little more effort into grammar though.

For those of us who aren't really aware of who this is or what is happening (like me), Peter Sunde is one of the founders of The Pirate Bay. He was sentenced to a year in prison and ordered to pay ~US$3 mil in restitution.[1] I believe his appeals were recently exhausted so he's going to have to serve his sentence.

1 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Sunde#The_Pirate_Bay_Tria...

OT rant: I can't read these Google machine translations, language is not a collection of words, not even words + syntax, it's full of idioms and collocations and hidden associations and stylistically motivated violations of accepted conventions. Instead of a translator who knows both languages (and cultures) well, the translation is being made by a code that actually knows neither.

What I mean is: translating is very similar to writing or composing, it is technical only on a very superficial level (and I'm not implying codes can't theoretically match Human abilities, but that the current approach is quite limited).

For business or other functional writing, I think Google translations are more than adequate most of the time, especially between fairly similar languages (like English and Swedish).

The problem with this text is that it is very emotional, and I think a lot of the impact gets lost in translation.

I agree with both of you, for technical language a technical approach to machine translation works.

It is an open question whether this is a fundamental problem with the approach, or simply a lack of relevant data for such translations. I suspect the former, but that's just a feeling. Perhaps with a sizeable corpus of literary translations, the system wouldn't do so badly.

It almost goes without saying. Near perfect machine translation is very very very difficult.

In the text, the author talks about people by name, but then Google translates their name from Swedish to English so the sentence loses some clarity and accuracy. But I do find it somewhat readable - I get the gist of what he is saying.

It does sound like, from his letter, the spokesman for TPB was convicted, jailed, and fined 100 million kroner just for being associated with TPB and not any crimes actually committed. They accuse him of running TPB load balancer which he claims he has never seen or logged in to..

He deserves clemency.

Really? Is complaining about the translation the best comment you can make about this letter?

Agreed. Not constructive, bordering to whining. The alternatives are, expecting someone to translate it, expecting Sunde to write it in English to begin with, or or for it not to be posted in the first place. It is incredible what native English speakers have to put up with...

Maybe, thinking this as a non-English native speaker, most of the Internet is written in a foreign language, so we are used to adapt ourselves. We don't expect to have everything available in our language. Heck, I'm really used to google "einstein en.wikipedia" for example, as I assume that the english article will be much richer than in my own language.

But when most of the world speaks your language, it looks like some people (I'm not generalizing here) are so used to expect english versions by default... that using tools like this feels bad.

Maybe some day, as our tools get better and better, this can be a thing of the past. Until then, if I can understand most of the text, it's not that bad.

To really make a good translation you need an absurdly huge database of objects, it's meaning, properties, relationships and labels in each language. For example, in japanese, you must use different prepositions if the object in question is round or flat. How do you know if the object being talked is round or flat? You just need an absurdly huge database with every little property possible, for every object in existance.

No one is anywhere near a good complete database yet, like we do in our memories. That's why machine translation currently suck. But Google is building such a database, which they call the "Knowledge Graph". Which, among many other things, will allow for much better translation.

I find the translation surprisingly good and helpful, even though I know quite a lot of Swedish.

For those looking for a translation, Rickard Falkvinge (party leader for the Pirate Party) just commented on the post that he's going to translate it. I'll post it here when he's done.

The response from the prosecutor got posted about an hour ago (just a quote from it): http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&...

Edit: Google translate link.

This is not a reply to the letter we're discussing in this thread.

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