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.<p>Here's the first paragraph in English:<p>> 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.<p>Here's the first paragraph in the Swedish translation:<p>> 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.<p>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.<p>Compare with a Kagi (DeepL) translation of the text:<p>> 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.<p>Kagi maintains the original structure, which makes it far easier to compare words and the original structure.<p>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 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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>LLM has been great for language learning and translation.
I found this very useful for learning second language: <a href="https://immersivetranslate.com/" rel="nofollow">https://immersivetranslate.com/</a><p>Daily news is better resource than books IMHO.<p>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'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.
A great Swedish reading resource is 8Sidor (<a href="https://8sidor.se/" rel="nofollow">https://8sidor.se/</a>) 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:<p>> 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 $END_TEXT$
In a similar vein, I made <a href="https://www.wikdict.com/reader/sv-en/" rel="nofollow">https://www.wikdict.com/reader/sv-en/</a> , 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.<p>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.
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).<p>I even found this [1] comment on Reddit, detailing the exact same concern. Perhaps worth looking into?<p>[1]: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Svenska/comments/1j4teje/comment/mgbr5lf/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/Svenska/comments/1j4teje/comment/mg...</a>
The example is the incipit of "The dangerous inheritance" by Izola Forrester<p><a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/75383/pg75383-images.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/75383/pg75383-images.ht...</a><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Izola_Forrester" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Izola_Forrester</a>
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.
I'm also learning Swedish, will definitely give this a try. I've built <a href="https://github.com/bjesus/swe">https://github.com/bjesus/swe</a> as a quick CLI dictionary that also helps with pronunciation and tenses.