Amharic to Haitian Creole: follow the owner and the speaking group
Nou can address a group or speak for one
Amharic distinguishes first-person plural from second-person plural reference. Haitian Creole nou can represent either we or plural you. A target sentence containing nou therefore needs its speaking situation to resolve who belongs to the group. This is particularly important when an Amharic announcement alternates between what the organisers will do and what the audience should do.
Preserve the named speaker or audience where the source supplies one. A statement of the organisers’ commitment is not an instruction to the recipients, even if the Haitian Creole pronoun has the same written form in both clauses. A heading, salutation, or preceding sentence can supply the distinction. Translating only a detached clause can remove that information. The target’s shared pronoun form makes context more important rather than making the Amharic distinction irrelevant.
A noun can be possessed and still take a following determiner
Amharic can encode a possessor in a noun suffix, and some possessive forms resemble definite markers. Haitian Creole commonly places a possessive expression after the noun. Figi li a illustrates his or her face with a following definite determiner. The target expression therefore need not be an unnecessary repetition simply because it contains both possession and definiteness.
First decide whether the Amharic source establishes an owner, a known referent, or both. The form mekina-w can receive the interpretation the car or his car in context. A Haitian Creole translation must resolve the relationship rather than assume that every such suffix identifies a male owner. Its third-person li does not itself distinguish male from female reference, so names may be needed to keep two owners distinct when the Amharic account relies on gendered forms.
Small Creole words can carry information supplied by Amharic morphology
Haitian Creole definite determiners follow the noun phrase and have forms conditioned by the preceding sounds. Compare zo a, the bone, with mont lan, the watch. Their different final elements are not masculine and feminine articles corresponding to Amharic gender agreement. Judging the target through a source gender distinction would misidentify the reason for the variation.
Amharic verbal forms also package grammatical information differently from Haitian Creole tense and aspect markers. Short forms such as te or ap belong to the grammatical interpretation of the event, not to a list of extra translated actions. Keep the whole Amharic predicate when checking whether the target describes a completed event, an ongoing situation, or a future plan. Looking only for the main dictionary verb will miss these distinctions. Conversely, counting every short marker as a separate verb can make a faithful translation appear to have added actions that were never intended.
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