Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Strange Swedish



At the Swedish-Japanese party in the previous blog post, I learned that the couple organizing the party had been to Sweden this summer. They also had a guide book for Japanese tourists going to Scandinavia. It had a short list of useful phrases in the back. They turned out to contain a surprising number of errors for such a short list. And strangely enough, all the pronunciation hints with Japanese phonetics were completely fine, so someone who knows quite a lot of Swedish must have been involved somewhere...

Things I noticed that should be corrected included some minor typographic and spelling errors:
"Tac så mycket" -> "Tack så mycket"
"God Morgon" -> "God morgon"
"Kandu packa in dem separat?" -> "Kan du packa in dem separat?"
"Notan,tack" -> "Notan, tack"

Grammatical errors:
"Det var jättegod" -> "Det var jättegott" (or possibly "Den var jättegod")

Forgetting to replace the English word with the Swedish one:
"Var ligger toilet?" -> "Var ligger toaletten?"

 Semantic strangeness:
"Får jag ha en karta?" -> "Kan jag få en karta?"
(the first version is correct Swedish, but means something like "Is it still OK if I come here and have a map with me?" instead of  "Could you give me a map?" that they wanted to write).

So out of 15 phrases, 7 contained errors. Maybe they should proofread better.

2 comments:

  1. That's really bad:/ Even I see errors.

    PS. Jag har ibland svårt att bestämma mig om jag ska skriva på svenska eller engelska, bara så du vet... jag är normal, bara lite vimmelkantigXD Ibland går det att tänka snabbare på ena och ibland på det andra språket. Hälsningar, en också'ganska söt... och gift' tjejXD

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  2. Så länge det är engelska, svenska eller japanska så ta vilket språk du vill :-)

    Jag skriver på engelska så att både mina släktingar i Sverige och mina bekanta i Japan ska kunna hänga med. Det visar sig dock att japanerna tycker att engelskan är för svår så de läser inte ändå... men men.

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