Bodo to Irish: the owner’s identity can change the following initial letter
A family noun can identify an owner before translation
Basumatary’s Bodo study illustrates family terms formed with pronominal material. Its examples include bibo for his or her elder sister and bida for his or her elder brother. An Irish translation must therefore preserve the owner relationship even where the Bodo form does not display a separate independent pronoun.
The relative’s own gender does not settle the owner’s gender. A Bodo reference to somebody’s elder sister can have a male or female family anchor. Recover that anchor from the surrounding account before constructing the Irish possession, rather than assume that a sister belongs to a woman’s family or a brother belongs to a man’s.
The same written a can encode different possession relations
The Irish dictionary illustrates a athair for his father and a hathair for her father. The short determiner remains a while the following form changes. A Bodo third-person family anchor therefore may require a target distinction that cannot be chosen from the ungendered source pronoun alone.
In a translated Bodo family account, use explicit information about the owner where the passage supplies it. If it does not, do not treat an arbitrary Irish initial pattern as information that was encoded in the source. The translator’s task is to preserve the identified relation, not manufacture a family owner from the appearance of the target word.
Plural owners are distinct from several relatives
The Irish dictionary gives a dtithe for their houses, illustrating a plural-ownership construction. Basumatary’s Bodo study separately distinguishes singular and plural personal reference. A source statement about several relatives should therefore not be interpreted as plural ownership unless the family anchor is itself a group.
A person can discuss several siblings while remaining the single owner-like anchor of the family expression. A group can also refer to one shared relative. Count the source family referents and their anchors independently before choosing Irish possession. The number of people in the wider story does not determine the number of owners in each individual phrase.
The same target a can participate in a verbal relation
The Irish dictionary also documents a before verbal nouns expressing a pronominal object. A translated Bodo passage moving from someone’s relative to an action involving that relative consequently needs the function of the target construction checked. Similar-looking Irish material can express possession in one phrase and an affected participant in another.
Basumatary distinguishes Bodo case marking for ownership, recipient and object relations. Preserve those roles when reconstructing the Irish sentence. A family member can own an item, receive another item and be the object of an action in separate clauses. One recurring person does not make the constructions identical. Keep the owner anchor and the event participant distinct so that the target initial changes belong to the correct grammatical relation each time.
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