Afrikaans to Bhojpuri: keep addressee, word order and grammatical roles distinct
Jy, u and julle do not map by number alone
Afrikaans jy addresses one person familiarly, u supplies respectful address, and julle normally addresses several people. Bhojpuri also distinguishes social levels in its pronouns, but honorific choices can affect verbal agreement as well. A courteous Afrikaans u should not be interpreted as an ordinary plural merely because a target form has associations with plural marking.
For a request to one customer, preserve that singular recipient and the respectful relationship together. For a message to a group of friends, preserve the group without unnecessarily turning it into a formal address. The target pronoun and verb need to work as one construction; changing only a pronoun after translation may leave inconsistent social marking.
Afrikaans ons is not a reason to reject every ham
Afrikaans ek and ons distinguish I from we. Bhojpuri ham can occur with singular first-person reference in documented usage. Seeing that form in a translation of ek therefore does not by itself prove that the translator has changed one speaker into a group.
The check is whether the complete Bhojpuri sentence identifies the intended participants. If the source explicitly says ek en my broer, it describes two people; if it is a personal promise by ek alone, it should remain a one-person commitment. Preserve any explicit group description, since relying on a superficial resemblance to another language’s plural pronoun can lead to unnecessary and incorrect edits.
A source preposition may follow its noun in the target
Afrikaans van, aan and met normally precede their associated phrase. Bhojpuri uses postpositions, and ke can mark more than one relationship according to the construction. There is no reliable rule that every Afrikaans aan becomes one target word regardless of whether it marks a recipient, location, or another relation.
In Jan gee die boek aan Maria, identify Jan as giver, the book as item, and Maria as recipient. If the next sentence mentions a book van Maria, decide whether it means ownership or origin. Those role distinctions guide the Bhojpuri construction. Keeping all three nouns in the source is more informative than asking the translator to infer the transfer from a short list of names and objects.
A main verb often moves later than in Afrikaans
Afrikaans main clauses commonly put a finite verb early; Bhojpuri’s basic clause pattern is subject, object, verb. A translated request may consequently place its main activity after material that appeared later in the Afrikaans sentence. That reordering is grammatical organization, not evidence that the activity was forgotten.
For a sentence containing both a reason and an instruction, track which action is requested and which explains the request. Do not restore Afrikaans order by moving the target verb forward manually. That can obscure the relationship between the clauses. Judge whether the recipient is told to bring, collect, or send the same item, rather than expecting the two languages to reveal those actions at the same point in the line.
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