Bosnian to Sesotho: a passive question can still ask who performed the action
Preserve the question’s unknown participant
Columbia’s BCS lessons distinguish personal-pronoun subject forms from accusative object forms and illustrate questions using short pronouns. These distinctions help identify what a Bosnian question asks about: the actor, the person affected or the identity of someone already mentioned. A Sesotho translation should preserve that missing information even if it uses a different sentence structure.
Who called the child and whom the child called have different answers. The child’s name and the verb can appear in both questions, yet their roles reverse. Before evaluating the target, identify the participant whose identity is unknown and the participant whose role the source already establishes.
Sesotho passive morphology changes the grammatical presentation
Katherine Demuth’s account of Sesotho describes passives in which the affected object becomes the subject and the actor can be expressed in a phrase marked by ke. It identifies passive morphology involving w or uw and notes associated changes to preceding labial consonants. A passive output is therefore not simply an active sentence with one extra independent word.
This matters when the target sentence begins with the person affected. That person is not necessarily the actor. Read the verb and any agent phrase together before concluding that the translation has reversed who did what. A change in grammatical subject can preserve the original event.
The documented question pattern has a practical purpose
Demuth gives a Sesotho passive question whose ordinary English interpretation asks which older woman performed an action, while its literal presentation places the affected person first. The account discusses passive and cleft constructions in questions about subjects. This is a concrete reason that a Bosnian actor question may have an unfamiliar-looking target arrangement.
The same study includes naturally occurring child speech as well as normalized analytical forms. Those categories should not be mixed: a child’s incomplete pronunciation is evidence in acquisition research, not a spelling model for a translated adult message. Use the documented constructional distinction rather than copying an unnormalized corpus line.
Apply the distinction to reports and requests for information
In a school message, a parent may know which child was called but ask which staff member called them. The target must keep the child as the affected participant and leave the staff member as the unknown actor. Rewriting the sentence into a more familiar order is useful only if it preserves those roles.
In a delivery inquiry, the recipient may ask who collected an item rather than who owns it. Ownership, collection and receipt are separate relationships. A passive-style target question should still seek the same event participant as the Bosnian source, not introduce a different question about possession.
For an account that omits the actor, do not invent one merely to make the target look active. Conversely, if the Bosnian source names the actor, retain that information unless the requested translation explicitly shortens the message. The decisive check is which participant the question or report identifies, not whether both languages begin with the same noun.
Language references