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たまには自分を解放してあげないとね
My Japanese is pretty poor and I have trouble with dividing sentences into parts.
So I've seen a translation for the above sentence that goes like "you should let yourself relax once in a while" and my question is: since it has a ない in it, shouldn't it be a negative sentence? As in "you should not let yourself relax".
Or am I looking at this sentence the wrong way? If that's the case, what is the correct way to do it?
たまには自分を解放してあげないとね
You are correct that ない makes this negative, but the translation you have seen is still a reasonable one. The key to understanding how, is the と that comes afterwards.
This と is a conditional, but the rest of the sentence is unspoken. You have to fill in the implication for yourself. "If you don't let yourself relax once in a while ...".
Examples conclusions would be "you'll get overly stressed", "you'll become unbearable", etc. Basically, whatever you want that fits the context. In Japanese, leaving sentences hanging like this is really common, but you can imagine that even in English you wouldn't necessarily finish this sentence.
