Translation - Swedish-English - Lätt att vara efterklok

"It is always easy to be wise after the event." is the way I would have translated this Swedish saying. Out of my knowledge, and British English experience, it is said so, but we do all know that there are many ways to say things in English.

Yes, Porfyhr,

When I read the breakdown of the original Swedish, your translation seems better to me. "Second-guess" is indeed sometimes used to say "judge something in hindsight" but it's usually used to say "guess what someone is thinking," and this interpretation does not correspond to the meaning of the original text.

So it should be

/It's/ easy to be wise after the event

han, would you accept this modification?

Why are there slashes (//) in this translation? There are none in the original.

Yes, I wonder how do you Swedes use the slash

Porfyhr also uses to sign as


/Porfyhr

I already once was surprised by the use of : in Sweden...

This sounds like what we call "20-20 hindsight" in North American English.

Yup: I was actually going to say that, but I thought it was too colloquial for this, especially where a proverb seemed to be in order if possible.

Thanks everybody, actually we had pretty much figured out what the text meant, and I was just waiting for han to get back to me with her comments, but she hasn't come back yet, it seems...

BTW, the slashes refer to the part of the usual proverb that was left out of the original text (and therefore the translation too), and would be used to flesh the "slice of the proverb" here back out to its real size again.

In the final translation, they would not be acceptable of course. (The full proverb could instead be quoted in full in the Remarks about the Translation section.)

Just that I understood what the translator meant by them, and was using her communicative style so our mutual understanding could go as smoothly as possible until the final cut.

But in English we usually use brackets for that sort of thing, not slashes - slashes are for choices.

Yeah, I was just doing what she was doing, so she didn't get confused.

Until the end, when she would have discovered the terrible, heartbreaking truth of our English punctuation...

Be wise after the event

Thanks, El Patillas, but that doesn't make much sense in English.

Ian, I think you should edit this and be done with it (or reject it). There's no sense in waiting for the translator to get back to you.

I will take my poll off - this is your baby.

Excuse my intermission, but i would omit slashes and parentheses.
If more words are needed, then they need to be used always, you can't omit them. it's the same when some languages haven't the subject expressed (like Italian), but you should express it in english, or swedish or deutsch...

A more detalied explanation may appear in the notes.

Thanks, everybody!

Yes thank´s! Now i´m just waiting for sombody to translate this to Latin. Half way there =)