Man vänjer sig.

When going through all my books to enter them on LibraryThing, I found a little volume I bought at a sale many years ago, had a quick look at and promptly forgot. Now I remember why.

Bo Carlsson: Bonnier Icons ordbok i sajbersvenska (1999)

This "dictionary of cyber-Swedish" (with the kind of phonetic spelling that was in vogue a decade ago, in the days of the Bubble when you could sell most anything by prefixing it with "cyber") by Bo Carlsson is neither.

First, most of the book is an uncredited straight translation of The Jargon File, maintained by Eric S. Raymond (or, possibly, its paper edition The New Hacker's Dictionary). When the old version was translated into Swedish in the mid-80s as Uppslagsbok för datafreakar, Guy L. Steele was at least credited as the author. Bo Carlsson is, for the most part, a rather inept translator and editor at best.

Second, many of the terms aren't Swedish. I could forgive many things if this book were useful, correct and/or given some new information. As it is now, it's a weird mixture of banalities, misunderstandings, and flat-out lies (both by omission and commission), with some information that might have been useful at the time sprinkled in.

The entries in this dictionary can be roughly divided into four categories:

1. Translations (or mistranslations) of English terms.
Carlsson seems to have assumed that if a term is used in English, there is a corresponding Swedish term with the same wording, with the result that he claims that "att välja påve" (= cause an electronic component to smoke; sorted under A for "att"), "biffa", "bokstavstroget" ("case sensitive"), "dinosaurpenna" ("dinosaur pen" — only he has interpreted "pen" as a writing implement!), "juvelskrin", "krypande elegans", "krypande funktionism", or "Occams rakhyvel" are used in Swedish. (In nearly 20 years as a record collector, I have never heard anyone call a CD case "juvelskrin" in Swedish — even "jewel box" is relatively rare!)

In this category, Carlsson also tends to edit the entries down to uselessness by removing all context, history, qualifying factors, and other information that would make the entry relevant. Compare, if you will, the word "gweep":

gweep

1. Att hacka.
2. Benämning på en hackare.

S. -en, s. V. -a, -ade, -at.

with the original entry from the Jargon File:

gweep: /gweep/

[WPI]

1. v. To hack, usually at night. At WPI, from 1975 onwards, one who gweeped could often be found at the College Computing Center punching cards or crashing the PDP-10 or, later, the DEC-20. A correspondent who was there at the time opines that the term was originally onomatopoetic, describing the keyclick sound of the Datapoint terminals long connected to the PDP-10; others allege that ‘gweep’ was the sound of the Datapoint's bell (compare feep). The term has survived the demise of those technologies, however, and was still alive in early 1999. “I'm going to go gweep for a while. See you in the morning.” “I gweep from 8 PM till 3 AM during the week.”

2. n. One who habitually gweeps in sense 1; a hacker. “He's a hard-core gweep, mumbles code in his sleep.” Around 1979 this was considered derogatory and not used in self-reference; it has since been proudly claimed in much the same way as geek.

Also, it is badly proofread, and Carlsson doesn't seem to understand the source half of the time. Another example:

kyrka

Tecknet *. S. -n, -or. [p. 152]

However, if the word "kyrka" ("church") was used for any special character, it was the ⌘ found on the Command key on a Mac keyboard!

2. English terms without translation, even where valid Swedish terms exist.
Example: "automaton" , "boustrophedonic" ("bustrofedon" is a well-known word in historical linguistics!), "bozotic", "Branch to fishkill", "indentation", "octal". There's an overlap with category 1, in that a term may be referred to in English in one entry, but in Swedish in another one. (Case in point: The entry for "autobogotiphobia" reads "Se bogotify.", but the closest entry for the referral is "bogotifiera" — which doesn't even mention "autobogotiphobia"!) (The reason is that Carlsson has translated the first entry, but edited out most of the entry referred to.)

3. Genuine Swedish terms on a very basic level.
Examples: "högerklicka", "musmtta" [sic!].

4. Explanations of English abbreviations and acronyms.
Carlsson calls them both acronyms, but compared to the other complaints it is a very minor issue. For this category, the book might actually have been of some use back in the day.

This book seems to be mercifully forgotten by everyone except the self-proclaimed author and a few libraries — and, strangely enough, Anders Lotsson at Computer Sweden, who usually has much more sense than that. Personally, I cannot recommend this book for any purpose: it's badly translated, very sloppily edited, the few parts that aren't actively misleading are about a decade old, and you can find better sources of information online. [EDIT 090607: It's not even heavy enough to make a good letter press or door stop. It's printed on very good paper, though.]