"They wash their trousers."
Translation:De tvättar sina byxor.
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This sentence seems to make people think that sina and deras can be used interchangeably. Though dera refers to a group of people other than the subject, right?
I don't think it's fair to blame the sentence… the English sentence is ambiguous, we don't know if they are washing their own trousers or the trousers of some other group of people. In Swedish, it would be sina for the first case, and deras for the latter case, so both versions are accepted, but sina is the main translation which is probably a good choice since that seems to be more likely.
It always makes a difference: sina byxor means their own trousers, but deras byxor means some other people's trousers.
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Maybe this is an English question, but, in order to avoid the ambiguity, is it also possible to make it clear that the trousers are their own, by saying that "they wash their own trousers" ? In this case, it is clear that the trousers are sina byxor, and not deras byxor, isn´t it.
This confused me because so far I've only known byxor to mean pants. I did wonder if they meant underwear or trousers, well I guess now I know!
I'm smiling because I associated byxor with boxer shorts -> trousers/pants.
So, being as I've learned that byxor means pants, byxor also is trousres? Pants AND Trousers?
Trousers and pants are the same thing. They're simply different words in different dialects of English.
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Does Swedish have a way to distinguish between one pair of trousers and several pairs of trousers, just like I added pair in English to make it countable? Can byxorna mean both?
It's ambiguous here, but you can generally say ett par byxor to mean a pair of trousers. That said, de tvättar sitt par byxor sounds a little weird - I'd be more inclined to say e.g. ett par byxor, even if the pair is theirs.
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Ok thank you. The whole concept of trousers coming in pairs instead of a single wearable object probably bothers me more than it should (even in english). How do you handle specific trousers, like jeans in Swedish. Can I go to a shop and buy "två jeans" meaning two pairs of trousers? (not sure about the grammar of jeans, according to google the plural is still jeans)
We'd usually say två par jeans for that as well. Same for e.g. shorts and leggings as well. Lots of English loanwords here, as you can see. :)
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Thank you for enlighting me, I hope I can remember this if I'm ever buying some trousers in Sweden, who knows. :)
Sure: tvätta händerna is the standard expression for washing one's hands.
But howcan we know that they are wahsing THEIR trousers? Like which THEIR? Their own trousers or other peoples (their) trousers? So there can be "deras" also?