"Vi ses senere."
Translation:See you later.
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Yes, if you're parting with someone you're expecting to see again before the day is over.
If you don't expect to see them again that soon, just skip the "senere" and it becomes more of an open ended "See you" or "See you soon".
Out of curiosity, how does this sentence work grammatically? Is 'ses' passive, or an idiomatic contraction of 'ser oss', or something else?
That is what I thought or assumed too, and the same for "vi snakkes" and some other similar phrases. But it turns out these are not the passive forms of å se and å snakke. They are their own s-verbs. For example, å ses / å sees: https://ordbok.uib.no/perl/ordbok.cgi?OPP=ses&bokmaal=+&ordbok=bokmaal
So what these particular s-verbs are doing is rolling up the 'hverandre', making it possible to say "see each other" in a very compact way. But I think the intuition (or inference from the -s) that you and I both had about this being a passive construction is not entirely off the mark. I don't know for sure, but I have a feeling that passive voice and reciprocality have something to do with why s-verbs arose in the first place, as well as convenience.
It's interesting to note that "vi ses" is both the present and the imperative of the verb å ses. So it seems we can think of its nearest translation being equally "we see each other" and the imperative "see each other".
I could be mistaken about all this, given that some of the mouse-over or word-click hints for "ses" are written as though it were the passive form of "å se". But it seems the ordbok says otherwise and I thought that made interesting food for thought.
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I read on another question that verbs ending in -es are reflexive, or reciprocal, so "see each other" or "see ourselves" rather than just "see". It suggested that it was helpful to think of "-es" as a contraction of "-er seg".
That's good for many cases, but it's also important to note that these so-called s-verbs are a somewhat more general category than just reflexive or reciprocal. Consider 'bøker kan leses' -- which means 'books can be read', and not 'books can read themselves'. There are many similar examples. That may not help with the specific case of 'vi ses' unless we want to think of it as 'we are seen' with an implied '(by each other)'. But I thought I'd mention it in case this more general look at s-verbs helps some other readers.
Why does it not accept "I will see you later"? As far as I can tell, that it an entirely correct translation as it preserves the meaning (even if the original has no mention of the first person).