Afrikaans to Sesotho sa Leboa: greetings, reference and agreement
A polite greeting need not count several listeners
Afrikaans Goeiedag can address one person without marking the relationship grammatically. In Sesotho sa Leboa, Dumelang is used as a respectful greeting even to one person. Its plural form does not prove that the translator has added an audience. Review the intended courtesy before replacing it with a singular form.
A farewell also distinguishes who leaves. Sepela gabotse is said to one person going away, while Šala gabotse is said to one person remaining. Afrikaans Totsiens leaves that distinction unstated. Establish whether the sender is departing or staying before adapting the expression. An appropriate reference to remaining is a farewell to the person who stays, not necessarily an order cancelling that person's plans.
Afrikaans die does not require a separate target article
Sesotho sa Leboa does not have an article system matching Afrikaans die and ’n. A noun without a separate article can still refer to the particular person or object established in the conversation. Do not assume that the absence of a word corresponding to die turns a specific booking or document into an unspecified one.
Instead, keep the information that lets the recipient identify the item. A reference to die dokument wat jy gestuur het is more precise than a fragment containing only die dokument when several files are involved. The target can convey identifiability through context and modifiers. Adding a demonstrative automatically may introduce a pointing or contrastive meaning that the Afrikaans did not intend.
Changing the noun can change its agreeing words
Sesotho sa Leboa uses noun classes with related subject, object and possessive concords. Afrikaans does not attach an equivalent class system to its invariant article die. Replacing a person noun with a thing noun can therefore require changes elsewhere, even when the basic Afrikaans sentence remains almost identical.
A saved phrase about one item is not a frame into which every new noun can be inserted unchanged. Check whether the relevant concord refers to the subject, an object or the possessed item. In particular, do not choose a possessive form solely from the owner's gender. The target relationship depends on the noun being linked and its grammatical class, not simply on whether Afrikaans uses sy or haar.
Spaces can divide the written pieces of one verb construction
University annotation material analyses ke a mo rata as one linguistic verb construction despite its four written units. A sequence of short Sesotho sa Leboa words is therefore not automatically a string of unrelated dictionary entries. Those pieces can jointly express the participants and action.
This differs from treating every Afrikaans space as a cue for one independent target word. When the source changes the person acted on, review the complete verbal construction. Do not delete a short concord because a nearby noun already names that participant. Conversely, do not join all the pieces into one long word merely because they function together grammatically: the language's written spacing still matters.
Language references