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Peter Sunde's request for clemency [Google translate]

44 points| kallus | 13 years ago |translate.google.com | reply

18 comments

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[+] vibrunazo|13 years ago|reply
> 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?

[+] tptacek|13 years ago|reply
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.

[+] INTPenis|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] mattdeboard|13 years ago|reply
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...

[+] nsns|13 years ago|reply
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).

[+] unreal37|13 years ago|reply
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.

[+] thmzlt|13 years ago|reply
Really? Is complaining about the translation the best comment you can make about this letter?
[+] rdl|13 years ago|reply
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).
[+] vibrunazo|13 years ago|reply
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.

[+] 632nm|13 years ago|reply
I find the translation surprisingly good and helpful, even though I know quite a lot of Swedish.
[+] hjalle|13 years ago|reply
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.