Tibetan to Divehi: keep pointing, reference and script direction separate
A Tibetan demonstrative does not settle every Divehi choice
Garrett and Hill identify the demonstratives ḥdi and de in their analysis of Classical Tibetan noun phrases. Their study concerns a written corpus, so its categories should not be stretched into a full account of every spoken Tibetan variety. For a passage identifying a document, person or place, first determine what the source expression actually points to.
Gnanadesikan describes a three-way Divehi demonstrative distinction: proximity to the speaker, proximity to the addressee, and elsewhere. That target distinction needs a situational reading, rather than an automatic substitution of two Tibetan dictionary labels. A document held by the recipient and a document stored away from both correspondents can require different treatment even if an English intermediary calls both of them that document.
Resolve the person without inventing gender
The Divehi grammar explicitly explains that its third-person proforms do not encode gender. An English gloss containing he or she therefore supplies information from the original situation; it does not establish a male or female ending in the Divehi form. This matters when checking a Tibetan translation through English, because the intermediary can make an unsupported identity appear grammatically certain.
For an exchange mentioning a translator and a visitor, follow each reference through the whole passage. If the Tibetan context identifies who handed over a document, preserve that participant. If the context leaves the person unresolved, do not turn a guessed English pronoun into a new fact about the visitor. The practical problem is reference tracking, even when the target language does not demand a gender choice.
Let Thaana run in its own direction
Tibetan and Thaana require different reading layouts. Unicode describes Thaana as right-to-left, with obligatory vowel notation, and notes that European numerals retain left-to-right direction within it. Copying a Divehi result into a message must preserve the character sequence rather than manually reversing characters to match a visual expectation.
A Tibetan source may combine a person’s name, a date and a reference number. In the Divehi result, check which label belongs to which number before adjusting alignment. A number appearing on a different side of a label is a reason to inspect the display and surrounding text, not permission to reverse its digits. Keep vowel signs attached to their letters when selecting or editing the output.
Check the pointed-to item in the finished message
Imagine a Tibetan instruction distinguishing a paper beside the sender from another paper beside the recipient. The useful final comparison asks whether the Divehi reader can still identify the intended paper. Merely retaining two nouns and two dates does not preserve the distinction if the pointing expressions now suggest the wrong location.
Review an actual copied version as well as the translator display. Mixed-direction punctuation can make a correctly stored reference hard to read, while a well-aligned sentence can still identify the wrong document. Confirm the participant, the intended nearby or distant item, and its unchanged identifier together. Those checks address different problems and should not be collapsed into a single judgment that the output looks fluent.
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