Afrikaans to Japanese: distinguish locations, family relationships and requests
By die kantoor can describe different relationships
Afrikaans can use by die kantoor when describing somebody's location and when describing an activity there. Japanese distinguishes a place where someone exists from the setting of an action. The particles に and で therefore cannot be selected by treating by as one fixed dictionary item.
Ek is by die kantoor locates the speaker; Ek werk by die kantoor describes work at that place. In the first kind of construction, Japanese can use に with an existence verb. For the place of an activity, で is appropriate. Keep the predicate attached to the location when translating a short workplace update: deleting is or werk removes the clue that distinguishes these two relationships.
An Afrikaans person and an object can both ‘be’ somewhere
Afrikaans is does not distinguish the presence of a person from the presence of an ordinary object. Japanese commonly uses います for a person and あります for an inanimate item. A sentence about where a colleague waits and one about where their bag lies can therefore require different verbs even when the Afrikaans structures look similar.
Do not replace one of these Japanese forms simply to make two location sentences match. First identify what is present. A missing colleague and a missing document also require the appropriate negative construction, rather than a second translated nie at the end. The target's grammatical choice concerns the entity being located, not the gender of the Afrikaans hy or sy used to refer to it.
Broer and suster may leave age unstated
Afrikaans my broer does not reveal whether the brother is older or younger than the speaker. Japanese family vocabulary commonly distinguishes 兄, an older brother, from 弟, a younger brother; 姉 and 妹 make the corresponding distinction for sisters. Supply the age relationship when it is known and matters to the introduction.
Japanese also distinguishes expressions for one's own family from respectful ways of referring to another person's relatives. A source changing from my broer to u broer can therefore require more than a new possessive pronoun. Identify whose family member is being discussed before adapting a saved introduction. The person's gender, relative age and relationship to the speaker are separate pieces of information, not interchangeable ways of deciding one word.
Asseblief does not attach unchanged to every verb form
A Japanese request can use a verb's te-form followed by ください. Simply placing ください after an arbitrary dictionary verb does not reproduce an Afrikaans instruction containing asseblief. The form of the action word belongs to the request construction.
Distinguish asking somebody to lend an item from asking permission to borrow it. Japanese 貸してください requests lending, while 借りてもいいですか asks whether borrowing is allowed. Both can serve a courteous workplace exchange, but they assign the action differently. State who gives and who receives the item in the Afrikaans context, then review the request as a whole rather than judging its politeness from one isolated ending.
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