Catalan to Haitian Creole: nou can refer to the speaker’s group or the listeners
A target pronoun can merge a distinction made by the source
CPNL distinguishes Catalan nosaltres, the speaker’s group, from vosaltres, the listeners. Those are different participants even when both groups contain several people. The distinction can remain important throughout a short message.
The APiCS Haitian Creole survey records nou for both first-person plural and second-person plural. Its Nou doktè example can mean we are doctors or you are doctors, depending on the exchange. A target nou cannot therefore be interpreted in isolation as proof that the Catalan speaker’s group or the addressees were selected correctly.
An exchange must preserve who asks and who undertakes the action
Consider an original Catalan exchange in which the organizers say that they will provide materials and ask the participants to bring identification. The two plural groups have different responsibilities. The target can use the same pronoun form in both clauses without making those responsibilities identical.
When translating that exchange, retain the relationship established by the speaker, audience, and any explicit group names. A statement about what the organizers will supply must not be read as a new instruction for the participants. If the source names the groups, keep those names connected to their actions rather than replacing every occurrence immediately with an ambiguous short form. The Catalan contrast between nosaltres and vosaltres supplies information that may need support from the surrounding Haitian wording.
Ell and ella can converge without changing the person described
CPNL lists Catalan third-person ell and ella separately. The Haitian survey gives li for third-person singular without a masculine-feminine distinction and l as its reduced dependent form. A shorter or gender-neutral target form need not mean that the referent has changed.
In an original Catalan account where a mother speaks to her son and a later sentence describes the mother leaving, identify the referent before translating the pronoun. The absence of feminine marking in Haitian li cannot establish that the son left instead. Equally, a target gender-neutral pronoun should not cause an extra gender description to be invented if the Catalan source leaves that information unstated.
A reduced form can belong to an object or a possessive relationship
The Haitian survey notes that dependent personal pronouns share subject and object forms, while adnominal possessives use the same personal forms after the noun. Its grammar therefore assigns function through the construction, not through a separate masculine or accusative pronoun series.
Catalan source forms and their positions can distinguish the person performing an action, the person affected, and a possessor. A Haitian li following a noun may connect that noun to a possessor, whereas a personal form in another construction can be an action participant. Preserve the source relationship before comparing pronoun spellings. The same target form can occur in several functions; neither its brevity nor its lack of gender marking is enough to identify who acts, who is affected, or whose item is being discussed.
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