Bangla to Tahitian: a completion marker does not identify past time by itself
Keep event completion separate from the calendar
The Bangla UD account distinguishes tense from aspect, including progressive and perfect-related forms. A source message can therefore convey both when an event is located and how its progress or completion is presented. Those pieces of information should not be collapsed into a single target-particle choice.
French Polynesia’s education guide explains that Tahitian ’ua can occur with past reference, but also with a future reference point. Seeing that particle does not by itself establish that the sender is talking about yesterday. Read the whole temporal expression and the event construction before interpreting the translation.
A future reference can locate an event already complete by then
The guide illustrates ’ua with a return happening tomorrow and a departure already complete relative to that return. Its discussion explicitly treats the future reference point separately from the completed event. This is useful for a Bangla message coordinating two journeys.
Distinguish a promise to depart tomorrow from a statement that the group will already have departed when somebody returns. Both concern tomorrow, but they arrange the events differently. Preserve the source’s ordering relation instead of selecting a particle merely because a future date appears in the sentence.
Do not assume every future ’ua construction guarantees completion
The same guide gives an important qualification for transitive predicates: a future-reference ’ua construction need not establish completion in the same way. It discusses an explicit finish construction where reaching the endpoint must be stated. A blanket equation between ’ua and will have finished would therefore overstate the evidence.
For a Bangla repair or painting update, determine whether the sender commits to work being finished by the stated time or merely locates the activity in that future setting. Keep an explicit source expression of finishing when it matters. Removing it because the target already contains ’ua can weaken a deadline or misrepresent a promised result.
Progressive meaning also needs its reference point
The guide contrasts ’ua with constructions involving tē, which present an event as ongoing rather than as having reached its endpoint. These aspectual descriptions are not a simple list of English-style tense equivalents. A work-in-progress report and a completed-work report can name the same activity while making different claims.
In the Bangla source, retain the form and time phrase that distinguish an ongoing action from a completed one. When checking Tahitian, ask whether the recipient would understand that the work remains underway or that its endpoint has been reached. Do not replace unfamiliar target material just to make it resemble the most familiar past-tense gloss.
For a practical final review, place the events on a timeline: the activity, its intended endpoint, and any later return or collection time. Then check which of those relations the source actually asserts. This preserves the Bangla message’s useful scheduling information while respecting the Tahitian distinction between temporal anchoring and event structure. The cited guide’s transitivity qualification is part of that check, not an exception to be silently discarded.
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