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Iversen’s Multiconfused Log (see p.1!) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6709 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes  Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 3305 of 3959 17 June 2013 at 1:54pm | IP Logged |
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I have spent the weekend with my family, which generally means less time to study languages. Besides my mother's beech tree is now so big that we can't watch Astra channels. At least that's my explanation for the fact that Astra functioned perfectly in April and not at all in May, with the amount of foliage on that monster tree as the only difference. Besides my sister isn't too keen on the other Scandinavian languages which narrows the field even further. She has said that whenever she has been able to understand a Swede it turned out to be a Norwegian. And even Norwegian seems to have entered the 'too much trouble' zone. On the other hand she is now even thinking of going to Berlin on her own - so much for Nordic brotherhood and all that!
In spite of the circumstances I have been doing some exercises. Actually I took my trusty Tuttle dictionary and started translating "Livsens Ondskab" by Gustav Wied into Bahasa Indonesia. But I didn't get very far. Those who study Danish may have read some Wied, and they will then know that he was a very humoristic and entertaining writer with his very own sardonic style. Unfortunately I had to acknowledge that the book was too difficult, but at least I got a lot of material for my wordlists. Later Sunday evening I tried translating my Portuguese article about the Bragança dynasty into Indonesian, and it was somewhat easier - but translating is always harder than writing yourself because you can't choose the statements yourself - you have to follow the text or ... So basically translation from L1 (or some Lx) into a weak language isn't done to increase your fluency in writing, but you learn a lot from the attempt in other respects. Words that have caused you a lot of trouble tend to stick better than things you didn't have problems with. One troubling discovery was that my Tuttle isn't truly symmetrical. Take for instance the word "dynasty", which in the English-Indo. section is translated into "dinasti" or "keluarga". "Keluarga"? Here my suspicion was raised because I know that this word basically means "family". Of course a dynasty is composed by members of a family, but it isn't the same thing, and the Indo.-English section didn't translate "keluarga" back into "dynasty". Then I checked some of my 'new words' from Wied. For instance he writes about crooked or curvy roads ('krumme' in Danish). First I looked under "curvy" and got "sintal, montok". The first of these two means "well-fed, rounded, shapely" - words that are more relevant for luscious ladies than for roads. And "Montok" is re-translated as "plump, rounded, well filled-out". So I looked under 'crooked' and misread the translation there as "bengkak" ("swollen"). My error - the correct word is of course "bengkok" ("bent, crooked"), and it does indeed seem to be a better choice than sintal/montok which primarily are used about wellfed females. But the example shows how easy it is to make grave errors if you trust your dictionaries too blindly (or your eyesight). The problem is that it takes forever if you have to control every suggested translation in the L1->L2 direction by looking it up in the L2->L1 direction - I simply can't do that. Now I just wonder how much babble I have written until now because I looked words up and naively used the things I found. With some trepidation I shall try my luck once again: BA I: Saya jelaskan dalam teks bahasa Inggris di atas, bagaimana sebuah kamus Tuttle yang baik hampir menipu saya, ketika saya mencoba untuk menulis tentang jalan pedesaan bengkok. Buku ini - yang biasanya dipercaya - memberi saya pilihan antara kata-kata ('curvy' --> sintal, montok) yang dirancang untuk deskripsi wanita. Ini lebih sulit untuk menerjemahkan daripada menulis dengan bebas, dan saya telah memilih sebuah buku Denmark yang sulit oleh penulis Denmark Gustav Wied. By the way, Sprachprofi (Judith Meyer) has recorded a speech she made in Indonesian after 6 weeks of study. It takes some guts to sign up for a rhetoric competition right after you have started out learning a language. But the experiment apparently went really well. Edited by Iversen on 17 June 2013 at 4:03pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6709 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 3306 of 3959 19 June 2013 at 7:10pm | IP Logged |
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Yours truly historic relic glued half of my holiday photos into an album yesterday evening. In the remaining time I copied a page of Potter in Irish with new words in the margin and all that. But I also did some Russian with translation and retranslation. Basically I translate a Russian text (from my guidebook to the Ducal Palace in Venezia) sentence by sentence, and without looking in the original I then reconstruct the original sentence. I have done it before, but because everything has to be written twice it takes forever and that's why I don't do it more often. However I can now basically translate a Russian text of this kind with just a few lookups, and it is also easier to remember the original sentences now than it was when I hardly could reach the end of a long Russian word without having forgotten the beginning. And having a Russian sentence buzzing around in your brain during the time it takes to write the translation down is part of the game, so maybe I should be happy about the time it takes.
RU: Вчера я сделал упражнение с переводом и реконструкции русских фраз, используя проход в мой русский руководство Дворца дожей в Венеции. Так что теперь я знаю, что есть только одна оригинальная картина Джованни Беллини в здании - остальное сжигалось в страшном пожаре 500 лет назад. Эта техника может быть описаны как общие обучение памяти, но с упором на слова и сооружений русских фраз. Но я не мог сделать это, прежде чем я мог перевести русский, не глядя сотни слов на каждой странице - это заняло бы слишком много времени! Можно также описаться это как копирование с задержкой. Edited by Iversen on 19 June 2013 at 7:15pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6709 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 3307 of 3959 22 June 2013 at 11:25pm | IP Logged |
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GER: Ich habe heute Vormittag stundenlang NDR geschaut. Zuerst Lokalfernsehen aus Bremen und Niedersachsen (ich hätte eher etwas von Schleswig-Holstein oder erwartet). Es scheint, daß die Leute dort neulich ganz viel Regen gehabt haben, und es wurde detailliert über vorbeugung von Überschwemmungsschaden gesprochen. Ich bin jetzt nicht ganz sicher, ob die Leute heute das Wort benutzt haben, aber ich habe bemerkt, daß es jetzt oft von " Überschwemmungsgebieten" geschprochen wird, d.h. Gebiete wozu überschüssiges Wasser fließen kann. Ich habe dies in Wikipedia nachgeschlagen, und es scheint, daß jetzt auch ein Niederländisches Wort Deutschland überschwemmt: Polder. Zitat: "Als ein Überschwemmungsgebiet, Retentionsgebiet (Retentionsfläche), Inundationsgebiet, Hochwasserpolder, Hochwasserschutzpolder oder kurz, aber mehrdeutig Polder bezeichnet man unbebautes, flaches Gelände an Flüssen oder Binnenseen, das durch Überflutung größere Mengen von Hochwasser aufnehmen kann. ".
Danach habe ich eine lange Sendung gesehen über den "Außenhändler" von der ehemaligen DDR. Dort gab es wie bekanntlich eine Planekonomie, so statt Betriebseigene Verkaufsleute gab es ein staatliches Burö mit Leute, die alles mögliches auf den Eksportmarkten verkaufen mußte. Einmal bekam ein solcher Außenhändler ein unerwartetes Angebot von BMW: die Vestdeutschen möchten etwas in Eisenach als Koproduktion produzieren lassen "weil dort alle die Specialisten waren". Aber dies wurde aus politische Gründen blokiert: die Aussenhändler sollten Dinger verkaufen, aber Kooperation mit den Fremden war unerwünscht. Ein weiteres interessantes Detail: ein Außenhändler wurde schon in den 50er Jahren nach Sizilien ausgesandt in den 50er... IT: In Sizilia ha dovuto abbandonare il codice di abbigliamento ufficiale - se venisse in abito completo con cravatta (cioè come un pinguino meno cravatta), gli abitanti di Trapani si hanno chiesto, come avessi guadagnato tutto il suo denaro - forse da loro? Cosicché è andato in città in maglione. Inoltre, questo tedesco perspicace ha scoperto che gli Siziliani hanno compreso il suo Italiano di scuola, ma per divenire più credibile dovrei piuttosto parlare nel dialetto locale - impossibile, beninteso, ma se ne uscì con un trucco ingegnoso: parlava Italiano misto con la propria dialetto svevo, e questa mistura ha piaciuto agli siciliani. SP: La tercera emisión de NDR tratave de viajes en tren en Ecuador. De hecho, yo he visitado Ecuador e viajado por tren en el año 2001. Después de mi visita parece que el presidente Rafael Carillo haya ordenado la reinvigoracón de ciertas líneas que estaban fuera de servicio en 2001. Yo había confiado en Lonely Planet, però en el dia del mio llegar a Alausi no habia ningún tren verso la famosa Nariz del Diablo, donde los trenes pasan de ida y vuelta abajo de las lomas. En cambio, monté el tren a Riobamba y bajé allí. Yo compartí un vagón con dos ecuadorianos - el resto de los turistas se sentaron en el techo. En Riobamba pasé la noche en una habitación con 3 camas y televisión al precio muy razonable de US$ 8. Más tarde me llevó también una autocarril desde Ibarra al 'punto 128 km' - los trenos no podian alcanzar entonces al viejo terminal de San Lorenzo. Un ferrocarríl es una autobus convertido y montado sobre raíles - y yo descubrí al azar que estas cosas estaban en una especie de hangar en Ibarrra - segundo mi LP no existían. Pero todos los pasajeros teniamos que ayudar los empleados placa giratoria al terminal de la línea para poder retornar. Y no teniamos ningun deseo para restar allí en el yermo. Hoy la linea se termina aparantemente a Salinas, que asimismo no constituye un lugar muy excitante. El nombre de 'Salinas' no está prometedor. Since noon I have mostly wathed TV in Italian (LInea Verde) and English, but before that I watched several hours of German TV from NDR. First some local news from Bremen and Lower Saxony, where it seems that there has been torrential rain recently so now people discuss where and how to find areas where a surplus of rain water can be stored until the sewers and rivers can lead it safely away. After that a program about the people who were sent around the world by the central administration of DDR (Eastern Germany) to negotiate with foreign companies and governments. Individual companies in the socialist countries were not allowed to send out their own representatives, and in many countries DDR had no diplomatic representations because this would lead to a break with BRD (Western Germany, known as die Bundesrepublik). One detail: one of these 'Aussenhändler' had been sent to Sicily, and he described how it was to adapt: for instance he had to disregard the rules for attire because the Sicilians otherwise assumed he earned his money from cheating them. He also noticed that his wellgroomed school Italian kept the local people at an arms distance. There wasn't time to learn the local dialect so he got the ingenuous idee to mix his school Italian with his native Swabian dialect - and the Sicilians actually liked the mixture. After that I watched a program on NDR about train travelling in Ecuador. I have actually been there done that myself - in 2001. It seems that some routes which didn't function in 2001 have been ressuscited later. In the 'good' old days the trains left the coast at Guayaquil, ran through Riobamba and Quito, and then they continued to the coastal town of San Lorenzo - not to speak of sidelines, etc. In 2001 I arrived in Alausí, where Lonely Planet had promised me there would be a train westwards down the Devil's Nose (where the train zigzags back and forth a mountain slope to get down to the lowland), but no - not that day. So I went Eastwards to Riobamba (in a wagon with two ecadorians innside and a lot of tourists on the roof), however I saw no sign of trains onwards towards Quito from that town - so I stayed for one night in a room with three beds + TV for 8 US$ and continued by bus the next day. Later I walked along some rails in Ibarra in the far North of the country - and here I saw a weird contraption in something looking like a hangar: a bus on rails. And lo and behold, disregarding that it didn't exist according to Lonely Planet this thing actually did four trips each week to a point called "128 km" somewhere in the Northern Nothingness. Undeterred I took the tour a Monday morning with one German tourist and som local people. At the endstation we all had to help turning the train in the other direction on a turntable, otherwise we couldn't return to Ibarra. However it seems that the route now goes to a place called Salinas, but according to the TV program the town was almost as uninteresting as 'point 128 km'. Local dancers and musicians train youngsters who maybe can earn a living based on train tourists, maybe even in other places in Ecuador - but it was really a forlorn place. And the name Salinas suggests a climate which is so hot and dry that you can produce salt. After that there was a program about the Copacana Beach in Rio de Janeiro which I haven't visited - although I must have passed it in the bus that took me to the local Botanical Garden. The string of gold nuggets in NDR then stopped, and I switched to Linea Verde from Raiuno and continued from there with mostly programs in English. And yes, I have also done some textbased studies of Russian, Irish and Portuguese today - just watching TV isn't enough. Edited by Iversen on 29 June 2013 at 5:16pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Anya Pentaglot Senior Member France Joined 5799 days ago 636 posts - 708 votes Speaks: Russian*, FrenchC1, English, Italian, Spanish Studies: German, Japanese, Hungarian, Sanskrit, Portuguese, Turkish, Mandarin Studies: Ancient Greek, Hindi | Message 3308 of 3959 23 June 2013 at 6:07pm | IP Logged |
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Hi Iversen,
I would like to make some comments to you Russian text. It's not clear what do you mean by "используя проход в мой русский руководство Дворца дожей в Венеции". "проход" means "passage". Instead of "руководство", if you mean "guide", it would be better "путеводитель". So I would say "используя мой русский путеводитель по Дворцу дожей в Венеции". 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6709 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 3309 of 3959 24 June 2013 at 12:37pm | IP Logged |
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"используя проход" is unclear even to myself right now - I think I have mixed several trains of thought, and the result is a mess. Thanks to Anya for not letting me get away with it.
I did actually spend more time on the exercise yesterday with the same путеводитель. It is hard enough to make it a nontrivial exercise to make the translation in the first place (art historians have a tendency to try to impress people with their learnedness), and it is certainly not trivial to retranslate stuff like this back into Russian. In another thread I was asked how my use of retranslation differs from the method used by Luca, and I answered that it is a question of the time factor: properly speaking I don't use it as a translation exercise, but rather as a way of forcing me to remember the original passage, but with full understanding of the grammar and the words (which I didn't have before thinking it through while making the hyperlitgeral translation). If I postponed the retranslation it would just be a normal translation exercise with a hyperliteral base instead of a normal text. I have used the method sparingly with other languages for a long time, but because you need to write the text twice (in translation and in the original formulation) it takes more time than just making a copy while checking all unknown words and grammatical features. But hopefully it is more efficient because it is more challenging. Edited by Iversen on 25 June 2013 at 11:10am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6709 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 3310 of 3959 25 June 2013 at 10:37am | IP Logged |
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I keep experimenting with retranslations. As I have written above it is a method I have used sparingly and inconsistently over the years, mostly because writing both a translation and a retransltion/remembrance version takes twice the time and space as it takes to copy the text while making sure I understand it. A couple of years ago we discussed retranslation methods in another thread here at HTLAL, and there I gave another reason for my limited use of retranslation, namely that I nornmally am much more advanced in the translation L2->L1 part than I am in the L1->L2 translation business. My error back then was deliberately to leave a considerable time space between each phase in the process. But doing the retranslaion a day later means that I have forgotten the original, and therefore I could just as well be translating any other text - I can't even match my 're'translation against the original because both might be possible (if not necessarily equally idiomatic.
Right now I do one sentence at a time, and his has surprised me how much better this works. I look up unknown words and solve any grammatical riddles while making the translation (which is the easy part of the process), and then I am so well prepared for the second part that I just have to look at the translation and then I can write down the original version (which is why I see it as much as memory training as a translation exercise). But I get a repetition of all the new words and I suddenly have a much clearer picture of the grammatical elements (including morphology) than I would have without the preceding hyperliteral translation phase. And I have a clear success criterion: the result must be exactly like the original. Finally I have noticed a bonus effect: having the original sentences 'on hold' in my head gives me almost the sensation of having invented them myself, so I expect that this will have an effect on my active skills which I don't get from the simple copying-while-making-a-translation-in-my-head. The only problem is that the method is more slower and more tiring so in between I have to do some ordinary copying-while..etc to relax. Now where does this elave truly 'normal' L1-L2 translation and independent production of my own formulations? Well, I rarely do the former because the latter is more fun, but the simple answer is that the 'feeling' of the retranslation method is very different from doing a normal translation without an answer key, but with the expectation that some teacher will put his/her own red marks everywhere (with or without an explanation). I think learning things while having the correct solution somewhere in my head functions better than producing and launching an essay or translation rocket into space and then wait several days for any feedback from some higher authority. BA I: Kemarin saya mencoba teknik pada teks tentang kebun binatang Ragunan di Jakarta Selatan. Itu banyak kata-kata tidak diketahui (tidak ketahui bagi saya, tentu saja), dan digunakan sejumlah derivasi yang tidak terjadi dalam kamus saya, sehingga saya harus menebak dari akar kata. Tetapi karena seluruh masalah ini diselesaikan sementara aku terjemahan, saya tidak merasakan tekanan apapun sementara membuat terjemahan kembali atau versi mengingat. Di Rusia panduan yang Schönbrunn (Air Mancur Cantik di Wina) itu lebih mudah saya untuk membuat terjemahan, karena kosakata saya jauh lebih besar, tapi itu tidak lebih mudah untuk menemukan kembali ke versi asli. By the way, did you know that there is a homepage with all the zoos in Indonesia? So far I have only seen one Bird Park on Bali and two zoos on Java (Surabaya, Yogyakarta) so when I get down there some time in the future to test my Indonesian I know where to go. Edited by Iversen on 28 June 2013 at 1:08am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6709 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 3311 of 3959 28 June 2013 at 12:53am | IP Logged |
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Today I have mostly concentrated on learning some Indonesian, but I have also been thinking about making a video about hilariously funny patterns in Irish morphology, coupled with observation from the first twenty pages of Assimil's Hungarian language guide ... on the other hand, maybe I shouldn't put that into the title line, or I'll scare any prospective viewers away.
Apart from that I have thought about a message about retranslation for my Guide to learning languages because I am becoming more and more fond of this technique now where I have found out how to integrate the notion into my normal routines - and mind you, I didn't do it much for years because I had let too long time pass between making the translation and the recreated original - if I have forgotten the original text then I could just as well be translating something else because the resultat won't be like the original - and then I think I have made a shipload of gross errors, which is a demoralizing feeling any language learner should avoid like the plague (even when it is justified). So I sat down with my old bilingual texts about Indonesian zoos and a few new ones. I read them loosely through, then I made a wordlist with words from yesterday and finally I went slowly through one text about the Zoo Gembira Loka in Yogyakarta plus the first half of a text about the Zoo in Surabaya (both of which I have visited, which makes the texts even more relevant). The first was definitely the most difficult of the two - with a first sentence of 98 words to set the level. The second switched between sentences I could understand straight away and others where I had to look several words up. But this is exactly the level where simple copying-with-understanding becomes too easy. And then I read some pages in my Romanian guidebook in the bus-almost-back-home ... and some more in an Oriental restaurant while waiting for my meal. Unfortunately I can't read the relevant languages, but my chopstick technique has become fairly good. BA I: Saya melanjutkan membaca teks pada kebun-kebun binatang Indonesia. Hari ini saya membuat terjemahan terjemahan-kembali dengan teks pada kebun binatang di Yogyakarta dan lain pada Kebun binatang di Surabaya. Teks pertama cukup sulit - saya berpikir bahwa kalimat dengan 98 kata-kata milik teks Latin abad pertengahan, tapi tidak, mereka muncul di tempat yang tak terduga. Saat ini aku membaca teks lagi, tapi sekarang saya mengerti tanpa masalah - dengan beberapa pengecualian, dimana "toxidemi" adalah yang paling aneh. Biasanya, "toxi-" berarti sesuatu hal tentang racun, tapi mungkin seharusnya terdapat 'taxidermi'. Dalam teks tentang kebun binatang di Surabaya kejutan saya paling yang telah Anda tulis 'Aquarium' ketika kamus saya mengatakan bahwa ada kata Indonesia 'Akuarium' (ditambah 'kolam ikan', tetapi dalam bagian Indonesia-Inggris diterjemahkan menjadi danau dengan ikan, "fish pond'). Saya hanya telah mengunjungi Indonesia sekali. Aku sedang tur di Tanah Toraja Sulawesi, dan kemudian saya memiliki dua minggu di Bali. Hal pertama yang saya lakukan setelah saya punya kamar di Sanur, membeli tiket pesawat ke Surabaya dan penerbangan kembali dari Yogyakarta. Bali adalah baik-baik saja, tapi dua minggu terlalu panjang. Btw. I spent some time yesterday on Harry Potter I in Irish. Now he has been with the Dursleys to the zoo, the avalanche of letters has occurred and I'm ready for the second advent of Mr. Hagrid. One of the more amusing effects of my efforts is that I now can recognize English loanwords through even a fairly thick Celtic mist - like "ainmhí" for 'animal', "goraille" for 'gorilla', "nathair" for a snake ('natter') - with the genitive "natrach" - and "aoibneas" ('happiness'). Edited by Iversen on 28 June 2013 at 1:30pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6709 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 3312 of 3959 28 June 2013 at 3:07pm | IP Logged |
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As planned, I have now added a message about retranslation to my Language Learning Guide part II.
1 person has voted this message useful |
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