'besöksstol' The Millennium Trilogy. An observation.

No spoilers.

A friend gave 'The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo' by Stieg Larsson to me ages ago and I'd never been able to get my teeth into it, then we went on holiday and 'bingo' I was hooked.

I was two thirds of the way through the first book when it struck me that visitors chair was an odd phrase but thought nothing of it, then on Wednesday I heard Front Row on radio 4 about authors and translating books

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b037v4gb

And it made think about the visitors chair again and if what I was reading was as intended etc etc but I didn't want to spoil my own enjoyment of the book so put it out of my mind again. 

I was close to finishing book 1 and my birthday was on Friday so I dropped boulder sized hints to the kids for book 2, they did pick up on them but no book materialised - so off I went to the local charity shops, I picked up the third book in Barnardos for 49p and the second book in Oxfam for £1.09 (ooh and a new bag) 

I'm now very nearly at the end of the second book and there's been lots of people sitting in visitors chairs, so I downloaded the Google translate app and set it up for English to Swedish and put in visitors chair. 

besöksstol

I even went back and forth between a few languages and always got visitor chair. 

I imagined a scenario when an English man/woman was sat with a Swede asking them to explain things, pointing at objects...

What's that?

-Bord-Table

That?

-Thats my chair, Stol. 

Your chair?

-Yes

So that? 

-Um, another chair, a visitors chair, besöksstol. 

Ooh besöksstol I like that. 

Maybe they'd had trouble with visitors and seating etiquette, visitors climbing on the lap of their hosts, so there was a need for visitors chairs?!? 

Who knows. 

I put  besöksstol into Google again and found this...

http://www.deadgoodbooks.co.uk/index.php/book-translation-an-insiders-perspective/

Seems I'm not alone!

So when does a stol become a besöksstol and when does a besöksstol become a stol?

And am I a visitor in my own home sat here at my Ikea 'Norden' table on my Ikea 'Gilbert' chairs?