Let's update the English translation of the Work Environment Act

2024-06-11

Henry

The original English translation of the Work Environment Act on 666a was sourced from the government-produced translation on government.se. That's a translation of a decade-old version of the law, so until today there was a big red warning at the top of every page on 666a saying "watch out, this is out of date". Not any more.

Over the past several months I've looked very carefully through every paragraph of every section of every chapter of this law. Most of it is the same as it was in the version the government translated back in 2014 or so. So for those, I've kept the original English translation and removed the warning.

In cases where the wording of a section of the law has changed, I've updated the Swedish text to match the latest version and removed the English translation entirely. The missing English text is replaced with links to GitHub issues where contributors (like you reading this, maybe) are invited to collaborate in public on updating the translations. Those pages are

• Chapter 1 Section 2c
• Chapter 1 Section 4
• Chapter 2 Section 8
• Chapter 2 Section 10
• Chapter 6 Section 17
• Chapter 9 Section 2
• Chapter 9 Section 5

And in cases where completely new sections have been added, I've done a similar thing. Those are

• Chapter 3 Section 8a
• Chapter 7 Section 15
• Chapter 7 Section 16
• Chapter 7 Section 17
• Chapter 7 Section 18
• Chapter 7 Section 19
• Chapter 7 Section 20

I don't think it's terribly complicated to translate these few words from Swedish to English. Especially not with so much reference material to work with. The vast majority of the vocabulary in a given paragraph of one of these laws overlaps massively with the vocabulary in the rest of the law.

What I do think is important and challenging, though, is for the translations to feel trustworthy. And for that I think it's important that the work of producing them should be methodical, accountable, and public. So that's why I've set it up as GitHub issues to start with.

In the long term, I'm interested in incorporating this translation process directly into 666a as a first-class citizen feature on equal footing with the email alerts and the labour laws. Requiring a GitHub account might exclude contributors for one thing. But more than that I think there's opportunity in the tooling itself. For example, one thing we'd produce would be a glossary of common legal words, and I think that could be a valuable resource in itself once completed.

But enough daydreaming. What's important right now is that the horrible red "out of date" warning is gone from the Work Environment Act translation on here. And there's now at least somewhere online where the work of updating these translations might actually happen. That's probably our strongest chance of advancing this form of integration at the moment, given the "Ausländer Raus" mentality that's currently so popular in Sweden's national parliament.