Bosnian to Albanian: preserve who does what inside a relative clause
The same person can have two grammatical roles
Columbia’s BCS lesson contrasts relative-clause examples with koji and koju and asks learners to track gender, number and case. The noun being described has one role in the main sentence and may have a different role inside its description. Albanian translation must preserve both relationships.
A person whom a speaker sees is the object of seeing. A person who sees the speaker is the subject of seeing. The words for person and see can remain unchanged while those roles reverse. Read the complete Bosnian description before deciding which participant performs the embedded action.
This is particularly useful in a contact message: the colleague who sent a file, the colleague whom someone contacted and the colleague to whom someone sent a file are different descriptions. Reducing all three to a loose English who can hide distinctions that the original Bosnian wording supplied.
Albanian offers an invariant and an inflected relative strategy
Ranko Matasović’s grammatical sketch describes invariant që alongside the inflected i cili series. It illustrates që with an accusative clitic in a description of a man seen by the speaker and with a dative clitic in a description involving giving a gift to a woman. The short target clitic contributes the embedded relationship.
The sketch separately gives inflected relative forms and an example with a preposition for friends with whom someone came. An Albanian relative description can therefore require attention to a connector, a clitic or a prepositional expression rather than a simple replacement for the Bosnian relative word.
The existence of two strategies is not a reason to combine their parts indiscriminately. Review the construction actually selected in the target. A difference in the number of visible pronoun-like words does not by itself establish that the translation has duplicated a person or added an extra participant.
Two actions in one sentence need two role checks
First identify the main action: perhaps the speaker is thanking, looking for or describing someone. Then identify the action inside the relative clause. A colleague being thanked may be the person who sent the document, but the document’s recipient remains another role. Keep those relationships distinct through the translation.
If the Bosnian description includes a preposition, establish what it means with that particular verb. With a person can express accompaniment, while to a person can identify a recipient. The Albanian phrase should preserve that relationship even when its grammatical construction differs from the source.
For a practical identification message, test the final description against the intended person. Does it identify the sender, the recipient or the person contacted? If several people could fit the noun alone, the relative clause may be the only information that selects the right one. Preserving its internal roles is therefore essential to the message’s usefulness.
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