Van Vugt: Cancelled or Canceled, that's the question

[Blog bot]

I don't know. Maybe it's just me. Every once in a while, when writing, I get lost in spelling out right the word(s) I am writing. My mind somehow blocks and doesn't do what it normally does automatically. Just like this week, when I needed to translate some captions. More precisely a number of options that were only provided in NLD. So I had to translate them to ENU. It happened with one of the options, namely Geannuleerd.

Geannuleerd is the NLD word for Cancel... Wait ... [Halter] ... Geannuleerd is the NLD word for Canceled ... Or is it Cancelled? I never had thought about, i.e. I never had haltered over, this one before. While writing this right now I actually wonder why I haltered, but I clearly did. If I would have been doing this task now I would have written Canceled straight away.

The funny thing is that, instead of using Google translate, which I do by default and would surely give me the ENU translation, I took a total different approach. I used NAV to help me out. True, this wasn't the first time, but it revealed something totally new to me. No, not really earthshaking, but nevertheless a funny insight.

As you might know by now I am a big TFS user, so I always have (a copy of) the NAV code I am working on/with stored on my laptop in text files. So I took the approach of searching through these text files by means of the search box in the explorer, assuming that this search would tell me which of the two would be right. Cancelled or Canceled.

Well, have a look.







Cancelled or Canceled, that's the question!

Even NAV won't tell me. OK, statistically it would be canceled (110 occurrences) and not cancelled (45 occurrences). So that's what I used right then, not spending more time on it thinking somewhat vague that this might have to do with ENU against ENG.

Now elaborating somewhat more on it here I found Google suggesting me canceled which then probably is ENU. Searching the Internet I also ran into this, which doesn't put a clear cut between the two, but surely eases my mind. But ...

... find myself still wondering why NAV utilizes not just one of them.



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