Translation of email salutations with name placeholders into Czech or other languages with vocative
Thread poster: Jiří Toman
Jiří Toman
Jiří Toman  Identity Verified
Local time: 17:27
English to Czech
+ ...
Jan 4, 2021

Dear colleagues,

I wanted to ask you, especially those who work in software localization or IT field in general, one simple question (with three subquestions).

How do you deal with emails that have name placeholders in salutations, such as "Dear {name}" when translating them into languages with vocative case where such placeholders won't work because of obvious declension issues? What is your favorite solution?

1. Do you just advise your client to drop the
... See more
Dear colleagues,

I wanted to ask you, especially those who work in software localization or IT field in general, one simple question (with three subquestions).

How do you deal with emails that have name placeholders in salutations, such as "Dear {name}" when translating them into languages with vocative case where such placeholders won't work because of obvious declension issues? What is your favorite solution?

1. Do you just advise your client to drop the placeholder and put a non-personalized salutation phrase?
2. Do you have a solution that works when the placeholder is kept (or only with a specific placeholder)?
3. What do you do if your client really wants to keep the placeholder there? Do you know of any reliable source of information (preferably in English) which could be sent to clients to explain the issue with name placeholders in languages such as Czech?

Thank you in advance any hint, idea or suggestion.
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Milan Condak
Milan Condak  Identity Verified
Local time: 17:27
English to Czech
Just for explanation Jan 4, 2021

Jiří Toman wrote:

3. Do you know of any reliable source of information (preferably in English) which could be sent to clients to explain the issue with name placeholders in languages such as Czech?


Just for explanation:

A. Russian language has no vocativ and English speakers have a problem with maximum 6x2 forms.

http://kv-emptypages.blogspot.com/2018/08/sdl-cracks-russian-neural-machine.html

For example, all of these are different forms of the word “book.”
--
image
--
That’s 12 forms of the same word, which are used depending on what role the word is playing in the sentence.

B. Czech language has in theory 7x2 forms.

http://www.condak.cz/nove/2019-09/02/cs/08.html

08 Morphological Neural Processing for Slavic Languages

Forms of adjective "pěkný"

5. vokativ pěkný pěkný pěkná pěkné pěkní pěkné pěkné pěkná

C. A comparison of two sentences in Slavic languages (sorry, no vocativ)

http://www.condak.cz/etranslation/2020-12/30/cs/06.html

HTH,

Milan


 
Sybille Brückner
Sybille Brückner  Identity Verified
Germany
Local time: 17:27
Member (2003)
English to German
+ ...
Explanation 2: Vocative in Czech (and Polish) Jan 5, 2021

is the case of a word, when I am addressing (or calling) a person.

Example:

http://cokdybysme.net/pdfs/vocative.pdf




Sybille


 
Jiří Toman
Jiří Toman  Identity Verified
Local time: 17:27
English to Czech
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER
Thank you very much Sybille Jan 5, 2021

Sybille wrote:

is the case of a word, when I am addressing (or calling) a person.

Example:

http://cokdybysme.net/pdfs/vocative.pdf




Sybille


This could come quite handy as a general introduction into this topic for my clients, great!


 
Jiří Toman
Jiří Toman  Identity Verified
Local time: 17:27
English to Czech
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER
Thank you Milan Jan 5, 2021

Milan Condak wrote:

A. Russian language has no vocativ and English speakers have a problem with maximum 6x2 forms.

http://kv-emptypages.blogspot.com/2018/08/sdl-cracks-russian-neural-machine.html


This is quite an interesting link and could come handy indeed.


 
Milan Condak
Milan Condak  Identity Verified
Local time: 17:27
English to Czech
Explanation in Czech and Polish in Wikipedia Jan 5, 2021

Jiří Toman wrote:

This is quite an interesting link and could come handy indeed.


Czech grammar

Wikipedia article is not translated into English. The Polish article contains the Polish order of declension of names, pronouns and numerals.

https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Česká_gramatika

https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gramatyka_języka_czeskiego

Vocative (5. pád) = Wołacz in Polish.
--
There are many stuff in English.

http://www.studyczech.cz/cs/zdroje-pro-studium-cestiny/

Česká gramatika online (autoři: L. A. Janda a Ch. E. Townsend), anglicky

http://www.seelrc.org:8080/grammar/pdf/stand_alone_czech.pdf

Chapter 2.1.1 Noun morphology
-

Milan

[Edited at 2021-01-05 14:37 GMT]


 
Sybille Brückner
Sybille Brückner  Identity Verified
Germany
Local time: 17:27
Member (2003)
English to German
+ ...
You are mistaken Jan 5, 2021

Milan,

Vocative is also the 7th case in Polish (as in Czech)

https://mowicpopolsku.com/polish-grammar/cases/vocative/

Sybille


 
Milan Condak
Milan Condak  Identity Verified
Local time: 17:27
English to Czech
Someone did rewrite Czech grammar? Jan 5, 2021

Sybille wrote:

Vocative is also the 7th case in Polish (as in Czech)

Sybille


In Czech is vocative 5th case.
Back to placeable problem.

Milan


 
Sybille Brückner
Sybille Brückner  Identity Verified
Germany
Local time: 17:27
Member (2003)
English to German
+ ...
@ Milan Jan 6, 2021

Sorry I didn't know that.

Sybille


 
Jessica Heili
Jessica Heili
United Kingdom
How do you deal with emails that have name placeholders in salutations, such as "Dear {name}" ? Feb 10, 2021

@Jiří Were you able to find a solution? I would be interested to find out. Thank you!

 
Jiří Toman
Jiří Toman  Identity Verified
Local time: 17:27
English to Czech
+ ...
TOPIC STARTER
My findings so far Feb 10, 2021

@Jessica: After consulting some of my peers, we agreed that we usually come across two "solutions" to this problem.

1. The most common (from what I gathered so far) is to put a generic word in front "Dear user {name}" (Vážený uživateli {name}), which kind of solves another common problem with masculine/feminine gender, but is still problematic stylistically, does not sound natural in Czech and does not really solve the issue with the vocative.
2. My preferred solution is t
... See more
@Jessica: After consulting some of my peers, we agreed that we usually come across two "solutions" to this problem.

1. The most common (from what I gathered so far) is to put a generic word in front "Dear user {name}" (Vážený uživateli {name}), which kind of solves another common problem with masculine/feminine gender, but is still problematic stylistically, does not sound natural in Czech and does not really solve the issue with the vocative.
2. My preferred solution is to remove the placeholder completely and use only "Dear" (Dobrý den), if the client agrees / is able to do it. This solves the problem completely, however, sometimes is not accepted by the client for various reasons (technical difficulties, branding rules, not willing to spend time on such a marginal linguistic issue etc.)

There are some online services offering automatic transformation of first names in nominative case into vocative, but I cannot tell you more about them yet, still trying to understand how they work exactly and if they could help us translators.

I also discovered that some Czech companies use a field in their CRM systems where users can put their preferred way of salutation already in vocative and this field is then used as the placeholder... this is a great workaround in my opinion. Unfortunately, all depends on the client and their possibilities. As translators (or project managers), we can just draw their attention to this issue, provide suggestions and let them decide... and then do our best with the solution they chose.
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Translation of email salutations with name placeholders into Czech or other languages with vocative







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