Hon hade blivit kissnödig
Sometimes I read a book for an odd reason. In this blog a reader expressed surprise that `pee’ was being used as a noun to indicate the act of peeing, as in “She needed a pee”. This piqued my interest not because of the issue of noun versus verb but because I wanted to know what was in the Swedish original, `Solstorm’ by Åsa Larsson.
The original sentence was “Hon hade blivit kissnödig”. I found it difficult to come up with a faithful translation that is as compact as the original. Both “She needed to pee” and “She needed a pee” come close but they do not convey the exact meaning. A too-literal translation runs as follows: “She had become piss-necessary”; the `necessary’ chafes here. The term `piss-pressed’ might be better, but I could not come up with one word that describes the state of having the need to micturate.
The Swedish `att kissa’ means `to piss’ and it is an obvious candidate for a false friend between that language and English. It turns out that Google Translate has problems with the sentence too. When I had it translate “Hon hade blivit kissnödig” I got
- English: She had become kissed
- Dutch: Ze was gekust
- Norwegian: Hun ble blitt kysset
Be careful what you ask for in Sweden.
1 comment
We have the word “pissa” in Swedish too, but it’s considered a bit vulgar, so by changing the first consonant we have made a “nicer” word. Google doesn’t translate directly between languages other than English, but via English, so if the translation to English goes wrong, the translation to all other languages will be wrong too.