springa på bio (toaletten) keep running to the cinema (lavatory)
This is from Norstedts stora svensk-engelska ordbok. And predictably just the dictionary's use of cinema and lavatory, which I find to be extremely uncolloquial mely in American English, bugged me. But obviously cinema and lavatory are actual English words that are fully intelligible. What bugs me is that the two don't seem to mean the same thing.
To "keep running to the lavatory" would imply that you are continually being interrupted by your need to go to the bathroom. I have no idea what it would mean to "keep running to the cinema." That would seem to imply that you don't stay there very long, like not long enough to see a movie, which begs the question: why the heck are you going there if not to see a movie? So, wondering if perhaps I'm crazy to object to this phrase (maybe it's a completely common thing to do in the UK--how would I know?), I looked up "keep running to the cinema" on Google. Zero hits. I am vindicated. Zero Internet hits for an English phrase is pretty much proof that no one says it.
If you search the Swedish phrase "springa på bio," however, you will find that people do indeed use that phrase. In fact, I got 174,000 hits for it. That's a lot of hits for a smallish perfusion language like Swedish. Based on context, it would appear that this is a completely normal way to say "go to the movies" in Swedish.
Not sure why the good folks at Norstedts couldn't include a viable translation for the phrase. "Go to the movies" gets well over a million hits.
1 comments:
At first glance it seemed to me (also American) that they were giving a phrase that meant "to keep running to the bathroom at the movies," which would be somewhat useful, I guess. But then I realized they were giving two alternate direct objects.
It seems as though the lexicographers were trying to combine two Swedish phrases that share the same pattern ("springa på ____" ) into one entry, which is understandable.
The trouble arises because in English, as you have pointed out, the two phrases do NOT have a parallel construction. I think if I were compiling this dictionary I would have just listed them separately:
springa på bio to go to the movies
springa på toaletten to keep going to the bathroom
Post a Comment