Belarusian to Lithuanian: familiar cases, different possessive behavior
An agreeing source possessive can become an invariable target form
Belarusian possessives commonly follow adjective agreement. Мой дом, my house, and мая кніга, my book, use different first-person possessive forms because their nouns have different genders. Lithuanian mano does not change in that way. In mano namas and mano knyga, the same word identifies the owner while the nouns retain their own Lithuanian grammar.
This is a useful distinction when translating a list of belongings. Several Belarusian forms of my do not imply different owners, and a repeated Lithuanian mano is not evidence that agreement was forgotten. Preserve the ownership relationship while allowing each language to distribute its grammatical information differently.
Shared case labels still require the target construction
Belarusian and Lithuanian both use nominative, accusative, genitive, and other case distinctions, but a source ending should not be copied without checking what licenses the target form. Belarusian accusatives commonly mark direct objects; they can also occur in directional expressions and expressions of duration. Those functions must first be distinguished from one another.
A sentence about reading a book for a certain period can therefore contain several pieces of information that need different treatment. The book is the affected item, while the period measures the activity. Treating every accusative-shaped source word as the same kind of target object confuses roles even when both languages have an accusative category.
Negative clauses deserve a separate check. Lithuanian commonly changes an affirmative transitive object from accusative to genitive under negation. The teaching contrast turiu namą versus neturiu namo, I have a house versus I do not have a house, shows that the verb and object change together. A target edit that only adds negation can leave an inappropriate object form.
Do not mistake a source gender ending for a target person ending
Belarusian past verbs distinguish gender and number without distinguishing first, second, and third person through the past ending itself. Чытаў identifies a masculine singular past reading form; a pronoun or discourse context establishes who read. A Lithuanian translation must recover that person reference before selecting its finite verb.
The issue often appears in clipped replies. A speaker answering a question about their own activity may omit the pronoun because it is obvious in the Belarusian conversation. The translation should not turn that reply into a statement about another man merely because the remaining form is masculine. Keep the omitted participant linked to the question it answers.
Possession can help disambiguate a fragment, but it is not a substitute for that analysis. My book could have been read by the speaker, an addressee, or somebody else. Read the possessive as identifying the owner and the verb construction as identifying the actor. For this direction, those two independent checks prevent an apparently familiar Slavic-to-Baltic sentence from assigning the right book to the wrong reader.
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