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Comment by austerity | Hacker News Reader

Interesting... Google Translate did a very decent job on the article, but the comments are all kinds of hilarious. Looks like informal speech is much harder to translate correctly. Although on the second thought it's not surprising.

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I guess some Russian reader hand corrected the translation of the article. Otherwise, Google translate is very poor for Russian text. the best example is the translated sentence from the text that caused the ban:

"Skopostnye train DURING topmozhenii ppohod more about kilometpa" (...)

(The sentence makes advice where the person doing suicide is best to do it, related to trains. Don't correct it and please don't post it in full here).

>"Skopostnye train DURING topmozhenii ppohod more about kilometpa"

Looks like message author has replaced cyrillic 'р' with latin 'p' in original text.

This just means that this text is FIDOnet legacy. Really old.

That was about the different character (Н, capital н).

That was about H, p and y - for various reasons.

Why not? It might be inconvenient to read, but it is an article about the censoring of that exact information. Celebrate freedom by translating it properly!

And having HN also banned in Russia? Is the particular banned information really worth it? It's a stupid "try to be funny" "how to do a suicide" text. Really not worth it, see the other comments. The inconvenience such things make to the users of the sites (country wide denial of service(!)) is much bigger than the possibility to change the opinion of some officials.

If you really want to provoke, try with those with which you share the language, get something banned in the UK, as the example:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_Unit...

I'm sure you can do it and also tell us how UK officials do senseless decisions. In fact, AFAIK, almost every European country has some form of internet censorship.

> And having HN also banned in Russia?

What's better - to have HN possibly banned, or to play along the tune and practically comply with the censorship?

It's the latter why we have it. Should Twitter, Facebook and YouTube haven't complied the whole issue would be likely non-existent by now.

Willing to translate it, but the piece posted here is not comprehensible. Post a direct link and I'll do it.

Also, original: http://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=41171

Edit: it does not look like sth about suicide. Words in order:

High-speed (adj), Train, Customs (on the border), Passage, More, About, (of) kilometer.

>Words in order: >High-speed (adj), Train, Customs (on the border), Passage, More, About, (of) kilometer.

Higher-speed rail passes at least kilometer while slowing down.

>it does not look like sth about suicide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_methods#Rail

Thanks for the Wikipedia link, now we know what the basis for the text was. Obviously the author started from there and added his "funny" options like "start the third world war."

The author of the text tries to be "funny." One of the options is "Start the third world war. Any red button in some army facility in your vicinity? Are you some president?"

I can't imagine anybody will gain any insights from that "banned" information. kasthack links to the Wikipedia article that was an obvious starting point for the text, to which the "funny" parts were added.

IIRC, Google Translate is based on machine learning where, especially for the initial learning phase, they relied on news articles from google news - which are often similar in content and source, but translated by national newspapers. That dataset doesn't contain a lot of informal speech though.

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