As I've said before, I'm studying Swedish. My Swedish is honestly awful because I haven't followed my own advice which I usually give my ESL students and which I myself followed when I was studying Japanese: memorize a sample sentence for the grammar point you are learning. And there are other reasons, too, such as not watching many videos, not putting a lot of time into it, etc.
But that's not what this post is about, even though I could write many words about why my Swedish is so horrible. This is to announce to the world that I managed to translate a simple Swedish article because our teacher gave us such an assignment for homework (and another aside: Colloquial Swedish, which we're using in class, is not an appropriate book for total beginners like me who have no clue what's going on. It progresses too quickly and there aren't enough chances to practice grammar, etc. I really think I have to take the class again. But what's great about the book is that they offer free audio--enjoy!)
The teacher told us about Ikea's super-rich and alleged cheapskate founder, who died a couple months ago. At that time, she told us to read an article about him at the excellent site 8 Sidor. Basically, that wonderful site has simplified news stories that you can read and also listen to. I love it! (NHK has a similar one for Japanese news, btw.)
So we read it, and instead of translating some clunky sentences and offering a stilted translation (which we had to do for class to create a close approximation of the original), I decided to attempt to make it smoother. So here's the result...I know he died back in January, but I'm posting it now because I've overcome my hesitation to share it with the world and I now had time to look it over.
From 8 Sidor's Ikeas grundare är död:
Ikea's Founder is Dead
News has spread throughout the world that the famous business owner, Ingvar Kamprad, has died. He was 91.
His company, Ikea, is known for inexpensive furniture that we buy in flat packages. Then we put it together in our home.
Today Ikea has more than 300 stores in 43 countries. 150,000 people work there.
Ingvar Kamprad was known for caring a lot about costs, including having factories in countries with low wages.
Ikea made Kamprad one of the richest people in the world. He liked to show that he lived a simple life, despite all his money. But to avoid paying taxes in Sweden, he lived in Switzerland for many years.
Over the years, Ingvar Kamprad got a lot of flak, including because he liked Nazism when he was young. He had said that he regretted it.
During the last few years, Ingvar Kamprad lived in Älmhult in Småland. That was where he started Ikea years ago in 1943.
