Bible Translations in Sweden

The article focuses on approaches to Bible translation that existed in Sweden in different periods. Special attention is payed to what is to date the latest translation in 2000 (Bible 2000). On the eve of celebration of the 500th anniversary of the first translation of the Gospels (1526) this topic is particularly relevant and discussed more and more actively in works by Swedish researchers, first and foremost because a new edition of the next Bible translation is planned in 2026. This tradition goes back to 1540-1541 when translation of the full Bible was printed, known as the Gustav Vasa Bible (Gustav Vasas Bibel), which has made an impact on the hearts and minds of Swedish people for almost four centuries and formed the basis of Standard Swedish. The approach declared by Luther has become a fundamental principle of Bible translations into Swedish: text must convey precisely the message, spirit and content of the original, not literally, however, but in the language that is clear to uneducated people. The Gustav Vasa Bible was reissued twice: in 1618 (the Gustav II Adolf Bible) and 1703 (the Charles XII Bible). Whats more, every new edition was redacted officially. In 1773 Gustav III established the Biblical Commission and requested to replace the outdated text with a new one. However, there were numerous changes in the Swedish Language during the XXth century. Besides, the development of linguistics and translation studies, as well as new scientific data have formed the basis of a new Bible translation project that was launched in 1972 and ended up with publishing the Bible-2000. The translation is the result of collaboration between numerous scholars and average readers. It took almost thirty years to perform the work. In the end, a text was created which most people think is unique, as it strives to convey the style of each particular book. However, there is obviously a gap between the new text and the centuries-old tradition of Bible translation, because after textual analysis was complete, scholars and translators often took decisions about how to render separate words and whole phrases. Their decisions had nothing in common with established practice. Consequently, critics consider that the text of Bible-2000 is often greatly oversimplified, everyday, lacking its solemn beauty and magnificence.

Automated Writing Support for Swedish Learners

This paper describes a tool developed for lexical and grammatical analysis of Swedish text and providing automated feedback for language learners. The system looks for words and word sequences that are likely to contain errors and suggests how to correct them using different non-neural models. The feedback consists of alternative word and word sequence suggestions and morphological features which need to be corrected. Although the system is able to provide reasonable feedback which is believed to be useful for language learners, it still needs further improvements to address the drawbacks such as low precision.

Granska API – an Online API for Grammar Checking and Other NLP Services

We present an online API to access a number of Natural Language Processing services developed at KTH. The services work on Swedish text. They include tokenization, part-of-speech tagging, shallow parsing, compound word analysis, word inflection, lemmatization, spelling error detection and correction, grammar checking, and more. The services can be accessed in several ways, including a RESTful interface, direct socket communication, and premade Web forms. The services are open to anyone. The source code is also freely available making it possible to set up another server or run the tools locally. We have also evaluated the performance of several of the services and compared them to other available systems. Both the precision and the recall for the Granska grammar checker are higher than for both Microsoft Word and Google Docs. The evaluation also shows that the recall is greatly improved when combining all the grammar checking services in the API, compared to any one method, and combining services is made easy by the API.

Multilingual practices in late medieval Swedish writing

Late medieval Sweden was a multilingual society. At least three languages ‐ namely Old Swedish, Low German, and Latin ‐ were in use, beside other regional languages. While the influence of Low German is easily detectable in all parts of the Swedish language system and has been investigated rather thoroughly from a historical sociolinguistic point of view (cf. Braunmüller 2004), the role of Latin has been rather marginalized in traditional Swedish language historiography, focusing on the earlier stages of Old Swedish, which are described as its classical form (cf. Pettersson 2005). Starting out as the language of religion, administration, diplomacy and, to some extent, trade, Latin was the dominant language of text production in Sweden until the 14th century, which saw Written Old Swedish gain some domains as well, resulting in a more balanced diglossic relation between the two languages. The emerging written variety of Swedish, however, was heavily influenced by the multilingual practices of scribes, in large part clerics who were used to using at least Swedish and Latin on a daily basis for a variety of communicative purposes (Höder 2010). These multilingual practices, ranging from ad hoc translations via code-switching to the application of Latin stylistic, textual, and syntactic norms in Swedish text production (Höder 2018), had a lasting impact on the later development of a Swedish proto-standard, and are still reflected in conservative text types today. This contribution approaches this development from a historical sociolinguistic and contact linguistic perspective, concentrating on the establishment of multilingual practices.

MELLAN DOMESTICERING OCH EXOTISERING.

The present paper deals with culture-specific items as a translational problem. It is based on two Polish translations of four Swedish books from the famous detective series by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. The aim of the study is to analyze some of the practices employed by two Polish translators against the translation methods proposed by Newmark (1988), Svane (2002) and Ingo (2009). For this purpose a number of highly specific cultural items have been collected and the methods applied by translators have been identified. The analysis has shown a big difference between translators in dealing with culture-specific items. The first translator, Maria Olszańska, adopts such translation methods as calque translation, hyperonym, functional equivalent, paraphrase and omission. The other translator, Halina Thylwe, prefers transference and calque translation combined with additional explanations, either in the main part of the text or in footnotes. The methods employed by both translators are a result of choosing between global translation strategies domestication and foreignization (Venuti 1995). Domestication, adopted in the older translations, minimizes the strangeness of the Swedish text to the Polish readers, whereas foreignization in the newer translations retains the foreignness of the original.

Professional language in Swedish clinical text: Linguistic characterization and comparative studies

This study investigates the linguistic characteristics of Swedish clinical text in radiology reports and doctor's daily notes from electronic health records (EHRs) in comparison to general Swedish and biomedical journal text. We quantify linguistic features through a comparative register analysis to determine how the free text of EHRs differ from general and biomedical Swedish text in terms of lexical complexity, word and sentence composition, and common sentence structures. The linguistic features are extracted using state-of-the-art computational tools: a tokenizer, a part-of-speech tagger, and scripts for statistical analysis. Results show that technical terms and abbreviations are more frequent in clinical text, and lexical variance is low. Moreover, clinical text frequently omit subjects, verbs, and function words resulting in shorter sentences. Clinical text not only differs from general Swedish, but also internally, across its sub-domains, e.g. sentences lacking verbs are significantly more frequent in radiology reports. These results provide a foundation for future development of automatic methods for EHR simplification or clarification.