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chrononaut | 11 months ago

As someone who doesn't speak Swedish, what makes this particular passage interesting, and what is it about the Norrköping dialect makes it interesting?

(I have attempted to study Swedish briefly, but I feel like I need to do more sustain discovery of content to consume in order to keep me engaged long term)

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eesmith|11 months ago

I'm going to make a guess.

I suspect the question is, will the translation to English convey the regional dialectal nuances of the original Swedish?

Decades ago I read one of Douglas Hofstadter's writings about Gorbachev's accent. (As least, I think it was Hofstader. He wrote a lot about issues of what it means to translate.)

Gorbachev had a distinct southern Russian accent, which affected how Russians viewed him.

"Gorbachev’s southern speech is held against him." - https://time.com/archive/6732598/mikhail-gorbachev-3/

More strongly, one Redditor writes "Gorbachev couldn't fucking pronounce Azerbaijan for a living, he sounded like a self-important moralistic buffoon." - https://www.reddit.com/r/AskARussian/comments/tw3zlm/what_do...

However, Americans mostly heard Gorbachev through translation.

Should the translator use General American English? Or use a US Southern accent? Perhaps a Foghorn Leghorn accent?

When you watch a Russian movie in English, do you expect English with a Russian accent (often fake), like in The Hunt For Red October? Or do you expect to hear people talking with strong regional US accents, so characters from Saint Petersburg might have, I dunno, a Chicago accent?

We see this in Peter Jackson's movie interpretation of "The Lord of the Rings", where the actors used regional English accents to portray the social and economic standing of characters who spoke Westron.

Based on what I read about this AI-assisted translation, they are using the original actors but speaking English, which means the dialectal nuances will not be interpretable by non-Swedish viewers.