English Translation
Tom screamed at the top of his lungs.
Is ‘kuin ääntä pääsi’ an ideomatic expression? I don’t understand the grammatical construction.
Since pääsi (inf päästä ) seems to have the meaning of reaching (1.) or allow to go (2.), I think that a more word for word translation could be “Tom screamed as loud as his voice allowed”. I don’t know in which direction the translation came to be, but, in any case, I am guessing the translator opted to translate the sentences keeping the meaning and using the appropriate idiomatic way of expressing it, rather than just going for a literal translation.
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I didn’t even get as far as to recognizing ‘pääsi’ as the past of ‘päästä’…
And, yes, in this case I agree there is no point in translating the sentence too literally.
If it can be of any help; this is how I usually operate, when faced with words I don’t understand or really discern what there are doing in a sentence (as was the case here). I usually check the wiktionary first. It has often entries for conjugated verbs, and most of the time, it has the declination tables for the nouns and adjectives, so I find it useful to discern what the word I’m struggling with is. From there, if I haven’t found anything on there, and I’m pretty sure it’s a verb, I was recently introduced to this website verbix, which usually recognises conjugated forms and suggests the infinitive (to be able to show the conjugation table). It has som definitions, but most of the time, I refer back to a dictionnary, once I have the infinitive I was looking for.
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I’ve just recently discovered that if a Finnish conjugated form doesn’t have its own Wiktionary entry, you can use the “Full text search” to find the base form.
Here’s an example: say you come across “päästiin”, which doesn’t currently have its own Wiktionary entry. However, the placeholder page, https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/päästiin#Finnish, lets you search for pages containing this word, which will lead you to päästä.
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I also use Wiktionary first. If that doesn’t help, and I am feeling adventurous, I use Kielitoimiston sanakirja. That requires an effort though, because it is all in Finnish and given my level of Finnish I have to work quite hard to get through it.