Bangla to Brazilian Portuguese: ownership words can become ambiguous in a new way
A clear Bangla owner can become an unclear seu
Dimock, Bhattacharji, and Chatterjee distinguish Bangla তোমার, ordinary your, আপনার, respectful your, and তার, ordinary his or her. The distinction between listener and third-person owner is visible in the source even when the third person’s gender remains unspecified.
The Entre amigos Portuguese textbook presents seu and sua with several possible owner interpretations: your, his, her, or their. It also gives dele and dela as ways to clarify third-person ownership. A translation can consequently create ambiguity that the Bangla did not contain. Selecting seu solely because a bilingual word list includes it under his is insufficient when the same paragraph also addresses a listener.
The final vowel describes the possession, not the owner
The textbook explains possessive agreement with the thing possessed. Meu livro means my book, while minha casa means my house. The speaker remains the owner in both; the noun determines the possessive’s gender. Bangla আমার does not change to reproduce this contrast.
Brazilian Portuguese can omit the definite article before an attributive possessive, according to the same textbook. A Bangla-to-Brazilian-Portuguese result without an article before such a phrase is therefore not automatically incomplete. This is a different issue from unclear ownership: inserting an article does not, by itself, tell the reader whether seu refers to the listener or someone else.
The continuous component needs an ongoing construction
The University of Texas analyzes Bangla kha-cch-il-am as I was eating, with separate continuous, past, and first-person components. A target rendering must preserve the ongoing event, rather than translate only the lexical meaning eat or substitute a habitual statement.
Carla Marques’s Ciberdúvidas explanation compares estar plus gerund with estar a plus infinitive, describing similar ongoing meanings and a Brazilian preference for the gerund construction. Thus eu estava comendo can express I was eating. The extra Portuguese word does not represent an extra source event: it distributes the source’s aspect and tense information across an auxiliary and the main verb.
An honorific is not a third-person gender marker
The Bangla course presents তিনি as a respectful reference that can mean either he or she. It separately gives first-, second-, and third-person verb paradigms, including ordinary and honorific forms. These distinctions matter before assigning a Portuguese owner expression such as dele or dela.
A respectful Bangla reference may establish social stance while leaving gender unknown. Choosing a gendered Portuguese clarification can solve the seu ambiguity only if the surrounding source actually identifies that person. Otherwise the translator has replaced one uncertainty with an unsupported detail. The same applies when continuous verbal material appears in the sentence: identifying the speaker through a Bangla ending does not identify the gender of a different owner mentioned elsewhere. Participant identity, source respect, and the target’s possessive agreement must therefore be resolved as separate grammatical relationships.
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