English Translation
Help yourself to as much as you need.
My understanding of tant que is that it means “as long as“ or “while“; autant que means “as much as“. Should this sentence have autant que instead of tant que?
Hi @corgwin24,
“Tant que” can indeed often be translated as “as long as” or “for as long as”.
I’d say the “while” meaning is less common. The main “while example” that I can think of is:
Tant que tu y es / Tant que vous y êtes → While you’re at it.
That often works. One exception I can think of is “(pour) autant que je sache”, which would be translated as “as far as I know”
The thing is that “tant que” can also be used to express quantity in some cases.
In such cases, “tant que” and “autant que” become synonymous:
Prends-en tant que tu veux. = Prends-en autant que tu veux. → Take as much as you want.
So “tant que” is fine here, as far as meaning goes anyway, but “autant que” would be at least as good and possibly better, especially in this specific example.
The problem I see with the French sentence here is that it is ambiguous.
It is ambiguous because “se servir” can mean both “to use” AND “to help oneself”.
If I was shown the French sentence out of context and asked to translate it into English, I would definitely translate it as:
“Use it (for) as long as you need (it)”, whereas here the English example basically means “Take as much as you need.”
I would choose the “wrong translation”, in part because “tant que” is used, which (to me) makes the “to use” meaning of “se servir” more likely (since “tant que” more often than not will mean as long as).
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