Ereader Easy Swedish | Hacker News Reader

Ereader Easy Swedish

ereader-swedish.fly.dev

114 pointscubbic66 comments

I believe this type of 'translation' can't help with learning a language unless the person who's reading already knows a lot of idiomatic expressions, grammar, and knows both English and Swedish on an everyday-conversation level. Let me show you what I mean.

Here's the first paragraph in English:

> The town studio of Signor Jacobelli faced the west. It was situated on the top floor of an old eight-storied building in the West Fifties. Thirty years ago this had been given over entirely to studios, but now it was broken up into a more profitable mêlée of semi-commercial establishments and light-housekeeping apartments.

Here's the first paragraph in the Swedish translation:

> Signor Jacobelli hade en ateljé högst upp i ett gammalt hus med åtta våningar. För trettio år sedan var huset fullt av konstnärer, men nu fanns där både butiker och lägenheter.

I get that the translation is to a 'simplified' version of Swedish; translations of fiction are often restructures of the original language, but this is to a point where one not only needs to know what the words in Swedish mean, but be able to interpret them based on a vast restructure compared with the original.

Compare with a Kagi (DeepL) translation of the text:

> Signor Jacobellis ateljé i staden vette mot väster. Den låg högst upp i ett gammalt åttavåningshus på West Fifties. För trettio år sedan hade detta uteslutande varit ateljéer, men nu var det uppdelat i en mer lönsam blandning av halvkommersiella etablissemang och lägenheter med enklare hushållning.

Kagi maintains the original structure, which makes it far easier to compare words and the original structure.

I could be wrong but to me it seems far easier to learn a language when a translation doesn't come with a vast restructure of the original content.

I think these issues stems form translating to the language you are learning being a bit backwards. It serves a purpose though you learn how to say complicated stuff in an easier way.

I am at a basic level in many languages. Often it is enough to know that I have the gist right: is it "please step out" or "Please do not step out".

You're not wrong but I think there is absolutely a case to be made for these kinds of restructurings as well. For one, giving you the restructured version exposes you to different ways of stating the same content, it might make reading longform content (without falling back to the original source material too often) more fluid, and more situationally, this kind of simplification and restructuring actually happens really often in subtitling, where character count is more leading than the lip movements a dub is based on. e.g. you'll hear one thing, but the sub is that same content often radically redone :)

Is "ateljé" (meaning art studio) really the correct Swedish translation here? I suspect "etta" (meaning one-room apartment) would be more suitable.

Yeah, 99% sure it's an apartment in this context.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studio_apartment

No, it's not. The book is taking place in some kind of arts center for music and art.

"And at exactly the same instant Signor Jacobelli was bursting without warning or ceremony into a studio on the second floor where a model posed."

My SO has lived in Sweden for a few years, gone through the provided Swedish classes to be eligible for university studies, but really feels the need to consume more swedish text.

The easier-to-read books in the libraries are all too simple, and they don't want to learn by regularly reading a lot of news (which is probably the easiest way to be trickle fed new and niche words), but this seems really nice.

This looks promising for their situation. I'll plop LoTR, Antimemetics Division or something in there later and see how it turns out!

The problem with learning Swedish is 95% of Swedes speak English and are more than happy to speak English.

And will switch to English as soon as we detect the slightest hint of a foreign accent, in a often misguided attempt to be helpful.

Except when asked if they speak English, where they then very hesitantly say (in perfect English btw) "a little bit".

Quite interesting cultural differences btw. In my experience, if you ask the same question in Denmark, the answer is "of course... Everybody here speaks English"

When I was learning Dutch, I found the same gap between kids' books that were too simple and proper novels that were too complex.

Newspapers were the easiest and best way to bridge that. They made it easy to pick a story where you had both some interest and enough background context.

I started with De Telegraaf, a popular newspaper, with short, simple stories and lots of photos. And over the course of 18 months worked my way up to serious papers like NRC Handelsblad and de Volkskrant.

So I'd give newspapers (and magazines) a go.

Back then, I'd sit in a cafe with my dictionary, reading their newspapers, and handwriting lists of words to learn. Nowadays it would be reading the paper's website on my laptop, pasting paragraphs into GPT, and adding the words to Anki etc :)

Funny timing - I just finished today's episode of "NOS Journaal in Makkelijke Taal". I have not regularly followed "the news" in many years, but this channel offers a pleasant way to get some daily practice; it's simple enough to follow along, with a few new words and phrases to learn each time. I'll check out De Telegraaf as well - thanks for the recommendation.

news is uniquely terrible for learning a language IMHO. One word changes meaning substantially.. lots of long form statements when a short form would work; lots of references that take local, political or cultural context to know; lots of ideas and words, very fast.. etc..

I also learned Swedish, which I think is very interesting, because Sweden has 1/4 the population of California, but has a relatively large influence on Western culture. At least in my mind.

Regarding learning a language, I recommend looking into Dr Krashen's theory of language acquisition, specifically comprehensible input. His favorite resource is comic books. For Swedish, I really like SVT with a VPN.

A lot of SVT is available with no VPN. It also has apps, so I tend to watch it on an Apple TV.

I second comic books, though the Swedish tends to be super colloquial and you will get stuff like "dig" rendered as "dej" (which is how it is generally pronounced, but not how it is formally written.) Kalle Anka is always the classic go to for Swedish learners.

NRK on the other hand actively tries to block everyone, which makes Norwegian a lot less accessible.

For those with VPN, here's SVT:

https://www.svtplay.se/

Swedish public service television also has an educational branch, which is here:

https://urplay.se/

I use comic books to teach my kids to read, I agree it ought to be a good option for foreign adults too.

On SVT I'd recommend Landet runt (Around the country), it shows a lot of feelgood stories from local news and is aimed at a broad audience, including kids and the elderly:

https://www.svtplay.se/landet-runt

There's also a news program for kids I think could be a good option to learn from:

https://www.svtplay.se/lilla-aktuellt-och-lilla-aktuellt-sko...

While I don't watch any of them myself, perhaps competition programs might work too:

https://www.svtplay.se/lista/svtId_jQ7LrRQ/tavlingsprogram

SVT Play (app or web) is a very good resource, and it is mostly subtitled in Swedish, which helps a lot. From the UK (at any rate) it is pretty rare to find many of the shows with georestructions, I do not find many. It is worth trying it without a VPN first, as you might be able to save money.

As I mentioned above, NRK is not so great. Most of the content is geoblocked, and you need a norwegian digital ID to watch it outside of Norway (or at least, Skandinavia) without a VPN. They also regularly block VPN's, so as an example, Tunnelbear used to be fine (and gives a fairly generous free tier if you play the "invite friends and do some tasks" game), but last time I tried, it was no longer working with the NRK TV app.

There is also a short news episode for adults, but in easy Swedish.

Nyheter på lätt svenska: https://www.svtplay.se/nyheter-pa-latt-svenska

A method I love, because it is actually a pleasure, is to find music you like in the language.

I love listening to the same songs over and over again anyway, and once in a while I get curious what they are actually saying in a new sentence.

I do this for learning German once in a while, but I am sure it would work fine for Swedish as well.

Markus Krunegård is my favourite right now, and I think he sings with a clear language.

But there are lots of (pop) music in Swedish with interesting lyrics; Veronica Maggio, Little Jinder, Håkan Hellström, Miss Li, Kent. A very random sample from a much much longer list obviously.

And a passive method, so, while it is pure joy, it needs to be complemented with actul studying of course.

This is super cool, I might fork this and change the prompt to Danish, and maybe use MIstral or DeepSeek as it has better Danish capabilities. I moved to Denmark and just passed my A1 exam, so looking for more easy stuff to do.

DR.dk has `ligetil` which is simplified/easy danish news. So if I can find similar, I use it. I can probably have LLM do easy for me. Also Noospeak for daily newsletter in Danish.

LLM has been great for language learning and translation.

Chuck https://lite.cnn.com/ into whatever language you need it in.

Generally I would suggest starting with a source in the target language and translating it into a language you know.

Ooh, those simplified news sites/newsletters sound great, I'll have to see if I can find something similar for Norwegian!

Sweden has 'lätt svenska' (easy Swedish) radio and TV news - https://www.svtplay.se/nyheter-pa-latt-svenska - https://www.sverigesradio.se/radioswedenpalattsvenska

pretty useful for learning indeed!

Noospeak.com has Norwegian. It is the one I use.

Klar Tale (https://www.klartale.no/) has easy to read Norwegian News. It was recommended to us in the government-run language classes.

I found this very useful for learning second language: https://immersivetranslate.com/

Daily news is better resource than books IMHO.

I have no vested interest here. The thing is, since it's not open source, I'm a bit worried about data privacy, especially because the plugin can see everything I browse.

It looks great, but I wish these would be more flexible. I'm going to have an extension, I'd prefer one that doesn't do only full translations.

I'd love a similar one to this that'd give you an "make this easier" button that'd start by providing a vocabulary for the paragraph, simplifying the language, or interjecting explanations in simple language, move to replacing words with English translations, and only as a last resort to a full translation.

With current LLMs it ought to be relatively easy to offer a UI with an "stepwise easier" option and just a handful of prompts to direct the "translation" result complexity accordingly...

I don't think news will give you a well rounded vocabulary. Im studying with an Anki deck which got its word order scraped from news.

I know three different words for price (price in general, specific item, and formal) but I have yet to see, say, oven.

Mmm. I think once you get out of the super common words that appear in any style of text, the ideal is to learn words from something guided by what appears specifically in what you want to read. For Japanese I'm currently using jpdb.io, which (if there is a deck for the book you're reading) lets you work on the words that match what you're reading. It has its flaws but overall it's been working out for me.

I think the idea is to use a book that you have already read in your language, maybe even multiple time (favourite book).

This way your mind already has all the associations stored in your brain for easy access, and you just need to link it to the foreign concepts. Supposed to be a great way to learn new languages after you know the basic grammar and such.

Parallel texts work quite well without having read it before too if you keep the original next to you. I lifted by German up a whole grade my last year, largely by reading Goethe's Faust in parallel with a translation.

Having an easy version is a big boon, though, and I think LLMs now provide an amazing opportunity to create custom proper parallel texts (showing both) where you could adjust the difficulty level of the translation to suit your current skill level.

Is it better than DeepL own extension?

Edit: it is.

It's a simple llm wrapper that converts any epub to easy swedish but one I use now to read all my books. I find it cool and something that I actually use and find useful.

I've used Claude to help explain Korean texts, but in Korean.

A great Swedish reading resource is 8Sidor (https://8sidor.se/) which is the news in "lätt svenska" (easy swedish.) You can subscribe to a physical copy, but honestly the site is great and has built in tools to aid translation (selecting a word or phrase it can easily be translated with a few clicks.)

Love that it's open source. Here's the magic sauce, i.e. system prompt:

> I want to translate this part of a book text to swedish. Translate to EASY swedish. Make the sentence structure easy. Make the words easy. Simplify it to A1 level while maintaining the story meaning. output ONLY the translation. Use the previous text and after text to understand the context. previous text: "{previous_text}" after text: "{after_text}" text to translate: $BEGIN_TEXT${original_chunk}$END_TEXT$ " DO NOT SKIP ANY TEXT INSIDE $BEGIN_TEXT$ and $END_TEXT$

Is there something similar in French? Preferably from French/English to simplified French?

But English is simplified French ;)

With apologies to Dumas ("L’anglais n’est que du français mal prononcé" - "English is little more than badly pronounced French" - spoken by D'Artagnan in Twenty Years After)

The "quick and dirty" solution would be to cut and paste into Claude or ChatGPT, probably in sections to prevent it from going too far off piste/forget what it's meant to be doing, with a suitable prompt.

n’est que du -> is only

"little more" can, and often is, be used as a synonym of "only". In this case, take it up with the translators of Dumas' works - it's a common choice for the translation.

This looks so cool, I am thinking of building something like this for French.

I am currently planning to take my B1 and it has been super hard.

In a similar vein, I made https://www.wikdict.com/reader/sv-en/ , which adds translation pop-ups to each word in the input text. The cool thing compared to manually looking up words is that it will translate idioms/phrases (if they are in the dictionary) and split compound words (if they are not in the dictionary) into their translatable parts.

I also have some code to add the translations as pop-up footnotes to epub files (I like to use that on my e-reader). That is not mature enough yet for public usage, but if anyone wants to help testing it, I can run some e-books through it. Just let me know!

"easy swedish" is almost an official genre of the language because some government information is available in such easy to read versions (that's what they are called), but the total text amount of it all must be rather small.

There is something similar in German, "einfache Sprache" (simple language) and the even easier "leichte Sprache". E.g.: https://www.nachrichtenleicht.de/siege-fuer-schach-spieler-1...

Yeah, there's the simple English Wikipedia. https://simple.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_English_Wikipedia

It's worth noting that "easy swedish" isn't just for immigrants, it as also (mostly?) for people with an intellectual disability.

As is often the case with accessibility affordances, they tend to improve things for groups outside of their intended audience, known as Universal Design. More reading on the subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_design

There’s even radio and Swedish ebooks in “lätt” or easy Swedish. Helped me when I learned:

Easy Swedish radio news: https://www.sverigesradio.se/grupp/22720

Easy Swedish books: https://www.bokus.com/cgi-bin/product_search.cgi?series=L%E4...

They also have simplified swedish news broadcasts. It's just easier to understand for immigrants who are still learning the language.

I tried to figure out if the translation is correct (the concept of a "studio apartment" in English is not easy to express in Swedish, and "ateljé" is certainly not it).

I even found this [1] comment on Reddit, detailing the exact same concern. Perhaps worth looking into?

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Svenska/comments/1j4teje/comment/mg...

I'm guessing it is pretty easy to express in Swedish once you learn how to speak about housing, though.

Don't know Swedish, but I'm fully lower-to-mid intermediate with Norwegian (I hit limits, but my workplace is Norwegian). Swedish and Norwegian are really similar. In Norwegian, they don't talk about bedrooms as much as total major rooms. So a studio apartment, the sort that contains a private bath and kitchen area, is a one-room apartment. A one bedroom is a two-room apartment.

And it looks like Swedish (unsurprisingly) is similar: https://www.reddit.com/r/Svenska/comments/16aigvx/question_o...

A studio apartment in Swedish is "en etta", literally meaning a "one room". An apartment with one bedroom would then be "en tvåa", two bedrooms "en trea".

True, it's actually quite simple. :)

The main point stands though, that this is not about art studios but just small apartments, and the automatic translation messes that up.

It's not a studio apartment though. The book takes place in some kind of arts center:

"And at exactly the same instant Signor Jacobelli was bursting without warning or ceremony into a studio on the second floor where a model posed."

The example is the incipit of "The dangerous inheritance" by Izola Forrester

https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/75383/pg75383-images.ht...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Izola_Forrester

Would love this for Finnish, not gonna lie :)

I started learning Swedish almost 40 years ago and I wish sometimes like this was available back then. As it was, I had to study quite hard for about 1-2 years by just listening to a lot of Swedish. Reading Swedish comfortably took almost six years to learn - I imagine it would have been faster with an app like this.

That example is removing a lot of text. Is this the issue in the changelog or is it still removing details?

It converts to lätt svenska (simplified Swedish), which is usually intended for beginners / students and I believe is the point here. The translated text is missing a lot of details, though, yes.

I'm currently starting to learn swedish myself. I was looking for the translation of "facing the west" but I think that was omitted in the translation. (Btw. Why is it facing THE west and not facing west anyways?) if the translation omits such a lot of detail it's not interesting to me.

Honestly probably just literary license -- this author seems to employ pretty florid prose. I'd say it actually sounds more natural to say "towards the west / mot väster" in Swedish since it's more common to use as a noun vs. as an adverb than in English.

If you're in the US, I recommend bokon.se for ebooks -- they're one of very few sites that accepts American credit cards. Otherwise, you're kind of stuck with libraries (if you have one nearby with a good foreign language section) or packing your suitcase. I'd also recommend Historiepodden on Spotify and Sommarprat on sverigesradio.se -- don't really watch TV myself but others here have mentioned svtplay.se if you're into that.

I know, I speak Swedish, but it's missing way more than details

> Thirty years ago this had been given over entirely to studios, but now it was broken up into a more profitable mêlée of semi-commercial establishments and light-housekeeping apartments.

From what I can tell, I'd hardly want to read the original. Way too verbose and I highly suspect the rest of the book is similar.

I'm also learning Swedish, will definitely give this a try. I've built https://github.com/bjesus/swe as a quick CLI dictionary that also helps with pronunciation and tenses.

Wow, this is nice. I've had a thing like this (well, for German) in my mind for years but knew I'd never create it. Thanks!

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