Ebba Segerberg

Ebba Segerberg is an academic and translator, noted for her translations of Swedish literature into English.

Segerberg is a Director of Communications at Washington University in St. Louis. She earned a Ph.D. from the University of California Berkeley, Department of Scandinavian in 1999. She has contributed to The Dictionary of Literary Biography: 20th Century Swedish Writers.

Ms Segerberg has a fondness for the phrase "get ahold of". For example, in "The Dogs of Riga", "And tell somebody to get ahold of the patrol officer". It also occurs in "Before The Frost", and "The Pyramid". It is unclear whether she is responsible for its constant recurrence in the Wallander series subtitling.

It also appears in her Kjell Eriksson translations "Since then it lay working in her subconscious but she couldn't get ahold of the loose thread" [Sedan dess låg den och arbetade i hennes undermedvetna men hon kunde omöjligen få fatt i den lösa trådänden]. Ironically, Google Translate produces the more acceptable "get hold of" for this passage.

Ditto in John Ajvide Lindqvist, "He threw her off, twisted around, and both of them tried to get ahold of the other".

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