I studied Swedish at university and in the third and fourth years (they sent us abroad for the second year for a kind of sink or swim total immersion) everyone doing Swedish, Norwegian and Danish had an hour's class together once a week where they taught us the differences between them with the aim of enabling us to read and translate from all three. It was then assumed we'd be able to read literature/research papers in all three in the final year.
It did work, except that when I am in Denmark I can't understand anything anyone says and you can't really ask them to write everything down :-) When I started working as an in-house translator it was again assumed that you could translate into English from all three. But it's a very passive three for the price of one. I can't speak Danish or Norwegian or write in them and Danish use of commas still trips me up if I do get the odd bit of Danish to do these days.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2020-10-25 10:05 am (UTC)It did work, except that when I am in Denmark I can't understand anything anyone says and you can't really ask them to write everything down :-) When I started working as an in-house translator it was again assumed that you could translate into English from all three. But it's a very passive three for the price of one. I can't speak Danish or Norwegian or write in them and Danish use of commas still trips me up if I do get the odd bit of Danish to do these days.