Afrikaans to Divehi: keep ownership clear across a different script and sentence structure
Se can become an ending on the owner
Afrikaans possession commonly uses se between an owner and the possessed item. Divehi can express genitive relationships with an ending such as -ge. The resulting expression is not expected to contain a separate word in the same position as Afrikaans se. Keep track of the relationship rather than matching the number of written words.
The documented form bappage means ‘father's’, from bappa, ‘father’. A phrase referring to pa se belongings therefore needs the owner identified before the item is described. A suffix attached to a personal name can likewise express possession without creating a different person's name. Do not remove that ending merely to make the name look like its isolated dictionary or identification form.
Afrikaans is does not require one universal Divehi verb
A source sentence can use is to identify somebody, describe a quality or place somebody at a location. These are different relationships even though Afrikaans uses the same short word. Divehi equational clauses have constructions involving particles commonly transcribed akee and ee; they should not be judged as incomplete because no independent word looks like an Afrikaans conjugated verb.
Before translating a sentence about a booking or an employee, distinguish identity from location. ‘This is the manager’ and ‘the manager is here’ answer different questions. Preserve which entity the message identifies and which information it supplies about that entity. An unfamiliar particle or a different clause shape can serve that distinction more accurately than inserting an extra verb to mirror the source.
Hy and sy should not force an ownership guess
Afrikaans sy can be a female subject or a masculine possessive, depending on its construction. Divehi third-person expressions and their possessive forms do not simply reproduce that Afrikaans spelling distinction. The documented ēna can refer to he or she, and ēnage expresses his or her.
In a message involving several people, make the owner explicit in the Afrikaans when the context does not establish it. A Divehi form that does not mark gender is not proof that the translator has changed the person. Conversely, do not let a generic possessive obscure which person's booking, document or belongings the recipient must identify. A name already present in the source may provide the needed clarity without guessing a relationship.
Right-to-left writing does not reverse the booking code
Divehi is normally written in Thaana, running from right to left. Afrikaans uses a left-to-right Latin script. When a Divehi paragraph includes a Latin reference such as AB-204, the reference should retain its character sequence rather than being manually reversed to match the surrounding paragraph direction.
Thaana vowel signs and the sign marking no vowel belong to the spelling. Do not delete these smaller marks because they look like punctuation above or below the main letters. After pasting a mixed-script message into another application, compare the actual code and name with the original record. A display-direction problem is separate from the linguistic relationship expressed by the Divehi sentence.
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