"Mina föräldrar tycker inte om att du äter myror."
Translation:My parents do not like that you eat ants.
26 Comments
As a student of French and Spanish, I can positively say it's an absolute godsend.
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I'd translate yours into Mina föräldrar vill inte att du ska äta myror and say that it does not state that you are in fact eating ants already, which the sentence on top here does. But I've got to admit I'm not a native English speaker and I haven't spoken any language for 75 years.
Arnauti, that perfectly explains the difference. "My parents do not like that you eat ants" is not incorrect in "American" English, but it seems a bit odd to us. I think the translation that we are most comfortable with is "My parents don't like THE FACT that you eat ants. By the way, your writing in English (like most young Swedes that I've met) is spot on. Okay, not quite, as I've yet to catch you in a grammatical or spelling mistake, which I can't say for many of the native speakers writing here. ;-)
If there is a difference it eludes an English speaker of 75 years. Your version is more natural, I hope you have reported it. "...do not like your eating ants" is correct but pedantic. There was a time when chocolate covered ants were all the rage.
I put "My parents don't like it if you eat ants." Is this not a correct translation? It feels valid to me.
No. If it were, there would be an "om" ("if") in the Swedish sentence as well.
In English English this translation would not be correct. You would have to put "do not like it that you eat ants" or one of the alternatives below.
it looked like voorouders in dutch. (fore-parents i guess) with ouders meaning parents. So ancestors, the ones that have gone before your parents. I fell for that one ( just as I did with stunde, thinking of the german word hour)
Does äldrar mean anything in swedish? The elderly perhaps or elders as in wise people?
"My parents don't like it when you eat ants" is simply much more natural English grammar even if it's not as "word for word" as the accepted solution.
It's not quite the same thing, though - works differently with tenses.
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Simply adding it to this sentence would make it sound more natural in English. My parents don't like it that you eat ants.
