Basque to Swedish: an already mentioned person is not always the owner marked by sin
Basque anaphoric reference and Swedish reflexive possession are different decisions
Laka explains Basque bera as a form referring back to an entity already established in discourse. She also describes variation between bera and hura across dialects and contexts. Recognizing an anaphoric reference therefore identifies a person or thing, but does not by itself choose the Swedish possessive sin.
A Basque account may keep talking about one person while introducing an action performed by somebody else. In Swedish, the person currently prominent in the story and the subject of the clause containing a possessive need not be identical. Keep that distinction when translating a reported event involving several people’s belongings.
Swedish possessives can change whose belongings are meant
Isof’s language guidance gives a basic pattern: sin, sitt and sina refer to the subject within the same clause, while personal possessives can refer to another participant or a subject in another clause. Its Mikael example contrasts his brother throwing away Mikael’s tickets with the brother throwing away his own tickets.
The guidance illustrates the contrast through hans biljetter and sina biljetter. The choice is not cosmetic. In a Basque report about discarded tickets, a Swedish translation can retain the same action and people yet assign the tickets to the wrong owner if it chooses the possessive from the story’s main character rather than the relevant clause structure.
A reported clause introduces its own participant structure
Laka’s Basque grammar distinguishes clauses describing actions from the phrases identifying their participants, and shows that recoverable pronouns may be omitted. A short embedded account can therefore have an understood subject distinct from the person who reports it. The missing separate pronoun does not license merging those people.
For a Basque message in which a manager says that an assistant moved somebody’s papers, determine the mover and paper-owner separately. The reporting manager remains important to the overall message, but that prominence does not automatically make the manager the local subject for a Swedish reflexive possessive. Preserve the ownership relation actually established by the source.
Infinitival constructions require more than the simplest rule
Isof separately discusses an object-plus-infinitive construction in which a disease is described as breaking down Erik’s brother. It accepts both sin and hans there, explaining that the infinitival phrase has an understood subject of its own. The basic same-clause pattern is therefore not an exceptionless rule for every complex Swedish sentence.
This is relevant when a Basque passage reports somebody seeing an event affect a relative or possession. A target infinitival construction may organize subjects differently from a fully finite clause. Do not correct every nonlocal-looking possessive mechanically without checking the particular Swedish construction.
Reference should remain stable when the target structure changes
Laka also notes that Basque third-person forms do not themselves distinguish the English he, she and it interpretations. Recovering the referent relies on the discourse. That same referent must remain identifiable when Swedish chooses a personal or reflexive possessive.
Read a Basque multi-person report by establishing who speaks, who acts inside each event and whose belongings are involved. Then choose Swedish wording for that structure. This preserves the owner across a change in clause organization instead of treating every reference back to an earlier person as a signal for sin.
Language references