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- "Han har till uppgift att ta …
"Han har till uppgift att ta hand om sjuka barn."
Translation:It is his task to take care of sick children.
30 Comments
1662
If you would have to have "en uppgift" to be "a task," why is "the task" accepted without it being "uppgiften"? Idiomatically, "he has a task to take care..." is perfectly reasonable, and I say that as a guy who works on medical records software where doctors and nurses are assigned tasks to take care of sick children.
I'm open to changing the accepted translations if it turns out I'm wrong, of course. I'll try to explain how I see the terms, given the Swedish, and I'll be very interested to see what you think about them.
The Swedish ha till uppgift means that it's somebody's responsibility to do something, not once but continuously. For instance, taking out the trash at home or ordering more coffee for the office might be my tasks. If I have en uppgift, it's much more likely to be something I'm required to do once, but not repeatedly.
I've always understood the possessive in English to correspond to the continuous interpretation in Swedish, as in "it's his task". Hence why I also allowed "the task", because it sounds like something that's carried out repeatedly. And, correspondingly, to me having "a task" sounds like something that's done once.
Am I way off here? :)
1662
Devalanteriel, your distinction between "he needs to do this today" and "he's the guy who has this responsibility all the time" is a game changer in my understanding of this.
Using "the" instead of "a" in that sentence does give a different implication, as you suggest, that "the" task is his now and his most of the time, where "a" task is probably more of a one-time thing.
With this distinction, I'm happy to not have the accepted translations updated.
Thanks for all that you do for us!
1458
till sometimes has this meaning of as or in the function of. So literally it's 'He has as a task to …'
It's similar to when we say äta något till middag = 'eat something for dinner' – the thing sort of fulfills a role, if you understand what I mean.
1458
You can contract has when it's an auxiliary, like in He's got the task to…, but not when it's a real verb, like in He has the task. Unfortunately the Duo machinery doesn't really grok the rules for this, so it sometimes generates contractions where it shouldn't (and in other cases, doesn't allow them where it ought to).