What does Forbrydelsen literally mean? Does it have a direct English translation, or was The Killing entirely different than the meaning of that word?
This drink... I like it! More!
According to Google Translate, it means "Crime".
share..or more exactly "The crime"
shareI'm Danish, and yes, the correct translation would be "The Crime".
shareAnd in my view the better title. The strength of this series is that it made the crime and its consequences the central character of the story instead of an incidental plot device. While the whodunnit was resolved in the last couple episodes, the rest of the series was on what it did to the lives (and deaths, this was a pretty bloody series) of everyone involved from the plumber to the city mayor.
shareI have a passing knowledge of Danish, and the suffix -en attached to words translates as 'the.' So, Forbrydelsen means 'the crime,' and when you put the 'en' in front of certain nouns--for instance, en forbrydelse--means 'a crime.'
Presumably, the reasoning for putting the definite article (the/-en), I would imagine, was to call attention to the specific crime, that is, the one of Nanna's murder.
The German version is "das Verbrechen" which means the same thing as in Danish.
I assume that the American version wanted something a bit more catchy than just 'the crime,' so they opted for the Killing.