Talk:kvicken

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kvicken, and dunkare

Swedish Harry Potter terms for "Snitch" and "Bludger" respectively. Both of the English terms failed RFV in March 2007. --Bequw → ¢ • τ 23:11, 15 November 2008 (UTC)

We don’t need entries for the English words here, and Swedish Wiktionary doesn’t need entries for the Swedish words, but we should keep the Swedish words in English Wiktionary for the purpose of translation. Otherwise, English-speakers trying to read Swedish could spend hours trying in vain to find out the meaning of the words. —Stephen 00:28, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

Regardless of a word's language, words coined in fictional domains will be allowed by the CFI only if they have entered common (non-Harry Potter). We don't, AFAIK, keep them around just for translations. I don't know if these Swedish words have entered common currency or not, but I suspect since we didn't find it happening for the original English words that the same is true for the Swedish one. Ultimately it will take a knowledge of Swedish to say for certain. --Bequw → ¢ • τ 00:05, 17 November 2008 (UTC)

You confuse definitions with translations. They are separate things. CFI is about words to be defined and their definitions. Translation is a separate subject. kvicken gets over 16,000 hits. Professional translators are generally not interested in definitions, we just want to get the correct translation. While the definition of kvicken is not worthy of inclusion, the possibility of it appearing in a text to be translated makes it worthwhile to include as a translation. If we’re going to have translations, we should have the words that translators need to look up in order to translate, and that includes kvicken. —Stephen 19:25, 17 November 2008 (UTC)

Without really entering the debate on the inclusion worthiness of HP terms, I would just like to expand a little about the words and raw google searches:

• "Kvicken": Raw google hits are - in this case - quite difficult to evaluate, as the hits for "kvicken" include several place names, plenty of online community nicknames/usernames, a nickname for at least one school, nicknames for several people, an old(?) word which seems to be related to bovine anatomy (possibly definite form of "kvicke"??), names of boats, etc. etc. What I believe this could indicate is that "kvicken" is an example of the possibility in Swedish to turn an adjective into a "nickname" (well, a bit loosely speaking: I don't know the details well enough to be able to explain that process or exactly what kind of word is formed) by adding -en or -an: "kvicken" would then mean something like "the fast/quick one".
• "Dunkare": An even more common term, which certainly does not only refer to HP. It could also mean a kind of player in basket ball (who makes dunks), in certain areas: the seeker in "hide and seek" (rather a variety of that game). The literal meaning would be something like "pounder", "someone (or something) which pounds".

So, what I'd like to say is that the words have not been originally invented for HP, but rather adapted to this new context. And yes, I know these senses should be added, but firstly: not by me tonight, and secondly: that won't resolve the issue about the HP specific senses anyway. \Mike 20:25, 17 November 2008 (UTC)

I don't much care about the fate of these entries, but I do care about the application of WT policy. I agree you can think of "definitions" and "translations" as separate concepts but we treat them equally before the CFI (I've not heard of another overlapping policy that covers these). I also think I understand your concern Stephen, so if you feel the CFI is too restrictive in aiding translation, maybe you'd like (to vote) to append a section to it concerning translations? Or maybe an Appendix page concerning translations of terms that don't pass the CFI (eg HP's "Snitch" and "Bludger")? Otherwise I still see so no way to keep the HP senses of these words if they haven't entered common currency. --Bequw → ¢ • τ 06:28, 18 November 2008 (UTC)

CFI virtually ignores translation. It gets a bare mention twice. If you worked professionally as a translator for a couple of years and had to look up the translations of a lot of the difficult terms, including proper names, esoteric technical terms, and unusual terms such as kvicken, you would not hesitate to have them. It’s only the confusion that most of us have trying to (or not trying to) differentiate the two disciplines that make the definition guys want to delete the words that the translation crowd wants to keep...and, unfortunately for the translation crowd, we seem to number only one or two. I have found that keeping words that experience and common sense says should be kept is very easy. I have never deleted a well-formed entry if the entry was something we needed to have. It’s as easy to keep them as falling off a log. —Stephen 06:52, 18 November 2008 (UTC)

Well, I am a professional translator (freelancing full-time for the past two years and part-time for a decade before that) and I hesitate to have them. Wiktionary is not KudoZ, and filling mainspace with random junk from our respective scratchpads or termbases is not particularly helpful to our purpose of creating a dictionary of all words in all languages. For one thing, in order to be successful Wiktionary needs to be maintainable, which a database of "everything a translator might want to know" would not be.

More generally, CFI do not magically stop applying just because an entry is non-English... perhaps I'm misunderstanding, but that's what you seem to imply. (Also, translators don't need definitions? Seriously? Word-to-word equivalences are almost useless without them. There's a reason why most translators have a stack of monolingual dictionaries next to their stack of bilingual ones.) -- Visviva 12:49, 18 November 2008 (UTC)

Agreed. --Bequw → ¢ • τ 05:56, 22 November 2008 (UTC)

RFV failed, entries deleted. Per \Mike, I've recreated them both with {{substub}} and {{defn|Swedish}} for their non–Harry Potter senses. —Ruakh_TALK 23:33, 10 June 2009 (UTC)