Catalan to French: similar go constructions can point in opposite temporal directions
Catalan va plus infinitive must not become French va plus infinitive mechanically
CPNL illustrates Catalan vaig comprar as a completed past purchase. By contrast, the University of Texas French course forms the futur proche with present aller plus an infinitive. Its je vais nager concerns a future swim. The familiar go-shaped auxiliary is therefore a particularly misleading surface similarity in this direction.
A Catalan account of an action already performed should remain past in French. A future plan would change whether the action has happened. The shared-looking auxiliary vocabulary does not outweigh the grammatical construction in which it appears.
The plural forms help distinguish actual going from the Catalan past auxiliary
CPNL contrasts present anem and aneu with past-auxiliary vam and vau. Its examples distinguish going somewhere routinely from having gone there on a previous occasion. French nous allons and vous allez belong to the present paradigm used in the future construction as well as ordinary motion.
For an original Catalan report that a group visited a museum last week, do not replace vam mechanically with a French present motion expression and leave the visiting infinitive unchanged. That would risk describing what the group is about to do. Conversely, a Catalan present journey should not be made past merely because the verb also participates in a past-tense auxiliary system. Read the complete source clause.
A planned departure is different from a completed departure
The French course also describes imperfect aller with an infinitive for what somebody was going to do. This construction places a prospective action relative to an earlier moment; it does not independently establish that the planned action was completed.
Consider a Catalan narrative where people planned to leave but stayed when a storm began. A French rendering should preserve the difference between the unrealized departure and the storm that actually began. In a separate narrative reporting that they left before the storm, a prospective construction alone would weaken a completed event into a plan. Establish the event’s actual status before selecting a tense associated with going.
Negation must retain which event or plan is denied
The French lesson places ne and pas around finite aller when negating its future construction. In that setting, the denial concerns the future action. The construction does not mean that an equivalent action failed to happen yesterday.
An original Catalan reply saying that the writer did not buy a ticket reports an absent past purchase. A reply saying the writer will not buy one refuses or predicts a future purchase. Both contain a negative and a buying action, but they answer different questions. A French target should not shift between them because a Catalan past auxiliary resembles French future aller. Preserve the source’s time reference, whether the action was merely planned or actually completed, and the exact proposition denied. These distinctions matter even in a two-word Catalan past form and cannot be recovered from matching the auxiliaries in isolation.
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