Translation - Danish-English - Kære Taya . Jeg savner dig rigtigt meget og...

Hi guys,
Looks good to me, but I don't know Danish.
What do you think? Should I validate it, or are there some mistakes in the meaning?
Thanks for your time!

CC: Porfyhr wkn

The English translation conveys the meaning and feeling just fine.

I do as well think that the similarities in the source text and the translations are good. But I would not accept the form/structure of the English translatedtext.

According to my translational education the form of the to-text should be as similar as possible to the from-text (source text).

/Porfyhr

I edited the shape of the translated text for it to be exactly like the shape of the original text.
So I think it is now validable...

Francky >> You speak Danish?

Hmm.. You know, the more I think about it...

I'm not sure that each language doesn't have its own conventions for punctuation, and that for example, at the beginning, the punctuation of
Dear Taya.
in Danish, with a period, might indeed be correct, where in English a comma would be required...

It seems to me that with changes in language might often naturally come changes in those languages' punctuation too (as even jp agreed in his examples on the different punctuation styles of Japanese, which are of course very different). It would be a shame to take correct punctuation in a source language and turn it into incorrect punctuation in the target one, just for the sake of the official rules we have to respect here at ...

Anyway, just a small IMHO idea...

(And I don't even know if the period at the end of
Dear Taya.
is correct punctuation in Danish. I'm just making general comments about the possibility of differing "correct" punctuation, in various different kinds of texts in different languages...)

CC: cucumis

Franck, thanks for cleaning it up, and I can validate it now, because I have two informed opinions that the Danish and the English are in good semantic correspondence too!

Thanks everybody!

CC: wkn Francky5591 MellowJoe

You're welcome, Ian!

MellowJoe, I was just talking about shape of the text, not about its content, because I don't speak Danish. what I just did is deleting some spaces you put between sentences, using the original text as a "gabarit"..

Sorry Ian, didn't understand exactly what is the problem with the punctuations. Is there something wrong in the rules of cucumis about them ?

Hi jp, thanks for answering! You know, in some formats (for example, as in the case above of a letter), there may be different correct punctuation styles in different languages:

For example, it seems to me that in French
Cher monsieur
and
Cher monsieur,
would both be possible at the beginning of a letter, but in English
Dear Sir
without a comma would be a little strange...

On the other hand in English
Dear Sir:
would be okay, but in French
Cher monsieur:
would be a little strange, right?

Maybe in Danish letters, it is correct to put a period after the salutation
Kære Taya.
But it English,
Dear Taya.
would never happen, so it looks very strange...

Some texts have their different "punctuation rules" in different languages that maybe should be followed accordingly, and not blindly followed au pied de la lettre. (In the same way as we have to change the capitalization of "dog" to "Hund" in German to maintain its correctness, for example?)

So if the translator knows that the punctuation in the source text is correct, he should then write the correct punctuation in the translation. Of course, it should be as close as possible to the original, but if the exact same punctuation would be strange in the translation (although it was not strange in the source text), then he should have the license to arrange it according to the punctuation rules of the language of the translation.

So if
Kære Taya.
is correct punctuation in Danish, we should be able to translate it as
Dear Taya,
in English.
Otherwise, we make a perfectly normal original into a strange translation?

What do you think?

CC: cucumis

I totally agree. That's what I wanted to tell in the sentence : "The translation must take into account the specific rules of the target language. For example in Spanish the reverse question mark or exclamation point comes before the sentence, in Japanese the sentences end with 。 (not with .) and there is no space before the next sentence, etc..."
Maybe one day I would like to open a "Learn" section on cucumis where we could write more detailed articles about this kind of things.

Thanks jp!
I guess I had misunderstood the punctuation policy: I thought it was more severe than it really was after all.
I therefore gave the Danish letter style the benefit of the doubt, and fixed the punctuation to make it English style!

CC: cucumis

Francky > Okay, I understand, thanks.

I am not a translator of education or trade, but I am 100% sure that in Danish, the correct punctuation is: "Kære Taya." - I believe you are right that in English it should be: "Dear Taya," thanks for correcting this.

Aren't you mixing two different specialties
within the linguistic field?

Proofreader

and

Translator

I am not a proofreader, I can correct texts to become understandable but I otherwise keep to the "from-language-form" and interpunction.

Mellow Joe...
So you mean that Danish differs from Norwegian and Swedish. Using incomplete sentences punctuated??

Sounds very strange.


CC: MellowJoe Francky5591

"Dear Taya" is not really a sentence is it?

I am not sure about correctness, but it's definately common practice when writing a letter.