I could do that for you.
I don’t understand the use of ‘åt’ in Swedish. To me ‘göre det åt dig’ sounds like a threat, ‘I could do this to you’. If the meaning is ‘I could do this for you’ I would expect something like ‘göre det för dig’. Disclaimer: I am Danish, and I am biased towards the expressions in my own language.
Yeah, prepositions. As hard as always… From what I can gather (at least) one of the uses of åt (and the one one I feel is being used here) is to imply that you do something, not only for someone else, but so that they themselves do not have to do it. As in, they would have had to do it if you hadn’t intervened. Contraposed to a sistuation where, if you hadn’t done it, the other person maybe wouldn’t have done it either.
I heard an episode of a podcast some time ago where they discussed this subject (the difference between “för” “till” and “åt”), in easy swedish
Exactly!
“Jag skulle kunna göra det här mot dig.”
Another thing: I would prefer to translate could with skulle kunna.
I have noticed that a lot (if not most of) the sentences I have encountered translated “could” as “kunde”. Because it was my understanding that “could” as a modal was translated as “skulle vilja kunna”, I have been treating them as if they were past sentences, even if in english they would have probably used “was able to”, so as not to get the bad habit to use “kunde” as “could” (instead of skulle kunna).
But since we are on the topic: is it just a matter of preference, as in, “kunde” could mean “could” but people prefer using “skulle vilja kunna”? Or is it really that “kunde” cannot ever be interpreted as “could”, but only as “was able to”?
If could is past tense, I would translate it as “kunde”; if it’s hypothetical, I would use “skulle kunna”.
“When I was young I could play all day long”: “När jag var liten kunde jag leka hela dagen”.
“I could do it if you wanted to”: Jag skulle kunna göra det om du ville."
I think the problem lies in English, where could is ambiguous; Swedish is more consistent (in this respect).
I asked my neighbour about it yesterday (a Finn but his native language is Swedish), and he said that in this sentence ‘åt dig’ definitely means ‘for you’.