24 Comments
Police can be used as collective noun in English, so we might also say, "The police run after him. " Can "polis" function the same way in Swedish?
893
Yes, we use polisen to mean both the force as a whole and any single police officer.
"Police" is known as a Plurale Tantum (Latin for "plural only") which means that it is always plural as there is no singular form. However, this only seems to be in English. All other languages seem to view "police" as singular.
Would policemen and policewomen be acceptable translations of poliserna, or are there other words for them in Swedish?
- 893
Yes on both of those, I think they should be accepted here although we do have words like polismännen and poliskvinnorna.
They are accepted, but thanks for the info. I'll use the more accurate word for both.
You are right on that it is what could be understood when saying this sentence. But until now the only accepted translation to 'springer' is 'running' in english and I will guess there should be another word for 'chasing' in swedish. Google translate gives 'att jaga' and 'att förfölja' among another couple.
As a non-fluent english speaker, is "the police" also a plural form instead of "the polices"?
I really couldn't understand using....the polices....is wrong or not using the word ...officers...?any way an english speaker can explain better
- 893
What's your native language? I think they run for him is a bit strange in English. It could mean for instance that they run for his sake. They rarely use run for with people the way they do in expressions like run for the hills where the hills is the goal of the running, I think.
There is this expression, the child runs for his mother but that doesn't mean the child runs after the mother, but to her.
PS if you speak Russian, бегут за ним or бегут вслед за ним are both fine here.
You can't say that because it has a different meaning. In this sentence the police are running after him because he did something wrong.
In the case of your sentence it means the police work for him.
Poliserna is plural so why my answer "the police runs after him" is correct but "the police run after him" is not correct?
That is strange. "The police runs after him" is grammatically incorrect. In American English the singular would be, "The policeman runs after him." The word, police, is a collective noun and is treated as plural - "The police run after him." We Americans are notoriously inconsistent when it comes to conjugation and collective nouns. We say "the press is" instead of "the press are", for example. In this case, it's police = plural.
I think it would be best to eliminate the gender here. Police officers should be used instead of policemen/policewomen.
The "correct" answer was "the police runs after him." that does not translate to english correctly.
I tried translating <poliserna> as "the police agents", which was not accepted, but I think it should be an accepted translation, since it's essentially a synonym for police officer.
According to wiki you are right: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_officer. For me 'police officer' sounds more natural than 'police agent', but maybe that is because i watch too much american tv series and they seem to reserve the use of 'agent' to specific organisations like the FBI, CIA etc.
