Rabat is a town in Morocco

The Danish word for “rebate” is “rabat”, which happens to also be the name of the capital of Morocco. So the English sentence “you can get 20% in rebates…” should not be translated as “du kan få op til 20 % i rabat…”, because it can be understood as implying that you must be in the Moroccan town to receive it. A better translation is the omission of “in”:  “du kan få op til 20 % rabat…”.

2 thoughts on “Rabat is a town in Morocco

  1. But you would never be in doubt, as the cty is spelled with a capital R in Danish… Besides, it is perfectly correct to say ‘at få 20 % i rabat’. I can’t even think of a situation, in which this phrase could be misinterpreted.

  2. In the actual case the line was a headline and was all in CAPS. So it was ever so slightly closer to be misunderstandable. I personally would tend to agree with you that both seem correct and nobody would normally confuse the two, however, as I let the sentence pass through, some other Danish-speaker down the chain of command felt the correction with removal of “in” would be better. You can confirm this yourself by typing “få 20 % i rabat” into Google. You will see that the sites that come up pretty much ALL omit the “i”. Modern, correct Danish seems to be “Få 20 % rabat” (with space between the 20 and % and no “i”). For one reason or another. The Rabat-story just makes it funnier.

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