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sometimes swedish and german are suspiciously similar. case in point:
Grenzübergangsstelle
gränsövergångsställe
they're so similar that when i translated the former in my head i rejected the translation because it couldn't possibly be that close… my loanword sense tingles
ah, i'm so tempted to make a deliberately “bad” machine translator between germanic languages that understands compound word formation patterns and has a huge dictionary of cognates
if you restricted it to just translating nouns then it would also be fun to teach it english's greco-roman patterns and japanese's kango and see how often you hit a perfect calque by accident, or just have fun with novel calques
@hikari 1) machine translate to chinese 2) dictionary lookup of each individual character’s most literal meaning 3) compound in target language
@0xabad1dea @hikari you jest but this is kind of what happened to Nahuatl — "mapachitli" got translated as 'that which takes everything into its hands' and not "grabbypaws", and so on, stripping all the metaphors out
@hikari that reminded me of when Amazon.se started and all the article descriptions were machine translated. Hilariously bad of course, but most of the time you could reconstruct what the original german text was...
tldr; it really is fascinating how similar swedish and german are if you speak both, but impenetrable if you don't