To be fair these translations slightly exaggerate the difference between Shanghainese and Mandarin. The speaker is speaking in a more formal register in her Mandarin samples than in her Shanghainese samples which causes greater vocabulary and structural differences than if they were at the same register. In fact I'm a little surprised she doesn't use exact analogs when translating between the two, e.g. 搿就是讲 -> 这就是说 instead of her choice of 这意味着, 越来越结棍了 -> 越来越历害了 instead of her choice of 愈演愈烈, and 开始寻被偷脱个物事了 -> 开始找被偷掉的东西了 instead of her choice of 开始找被偷物品了, since it is both a more accurate translation and reflects the structural similarity of the two sentences much better (there is a one-to-one correspondence between each word of both sentences).

Regardless I certainly would not view Shanghainese as mutually intelligible with Mandarin.

> In fact I'm a little surprised she doesn't use exact analogs when translating between the two

If you check the logs on the sentence page, you'll see that the Shanghainese sentences are actually translated from the Mandarin. So she was going from relatively formal Mandarin to more informal Shanghainese, probably because that's what she's accustomed to speaking.

I didn't really intend these as a demonstration of how different Shanghainese and Mandarin are even when you translate as literally as possible, but more as a way for people on HN who know Mandarin but haven't had much exposure to Shanghainese to try and see how much they understand. I like to think I understood a few words like 自己 and 警察, but maybe that's because I looked at the text first.

This is a super high quality post - thank you!

I think you've also answered my questions in this space before, what kind of work do you do? You seem very familiar with asian languages deeper than just a native speaker/hobbyist might be.

I thought recording 6 was vaguely mandarin sounding, if you squinted you could more or less guess what was being said. Agreed that the rest are hard to understand but I don't think it takes native mandarin speakers much effort to get to a point where they can get proficient in another dialect. IMO learning Shanghainese from Mandarin will be easier than learning Portuguese if you speak Spanish