I was playing Breath of the Wild in German to practice, but I came across a difficult sentence. The sentence reads, “Ich will ja Daruk gegenüber nicht respektlos sein, aber wenn wir Rudania keine Abreibung verpassen…”. I know the first part means, “I don’t want to be disrespectful to Daruk” but the second sentence seems to mean “if we miss giving Rudania no beating”. I plugged it into a translator and it said that it means “If we don’t give Rudania a beating…” but I’m not sure how that can be the same - in English, that construction would be interpreted as “when we give Rudania a beating”. I’ve not heard of this construction before, so which translation is correct?
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2As a consolation, this is a fairly unexpected second meaning of "verpassen". Sure, in hindsight you see that the English "pass", meaning something like "transition", can not only mean "pass by" but also "transition from one to the other", i.e., give ...– Peter - Reinstate MonicaJun 5, 2022 at 5:37
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2 Answers
The translator's. The construction here is "jemandem etwas verpassen", which means "to give someone something", often with things like "beating" or "thrashing". (There's also "jemandem einen Denkzettel verpassen", for example, "to teach someone a lesson".) "Etwas verpassen" meaning "to miss sth." has nothing to do with that.
You have just missed a second meaning of the verb verpassen. In "eine Abreibung verpassen", "verpassen" means "to give".
