Catalan to Italian: courteous address can change grammatical person without changing the recipient
Vós and vostè cannot be mapped by their endings alone
Catalan offers courteous address through vós and vostè, but they use different grammatical agreement. The IEC describes vós with second-person plural verbal behaviour and vostè with third-person singular. Both can address one person. An Italian translation must preserve the relationship rather than mechanically preserve grammatical person.
Piera Molinelli’s Treccani account distinguishes Italian tu, voi and courteous Lei among address forms. A Catalan vós addressed respectfully to one recipient should not become an Italian plural audience solely because the source verb has plural morphology.
Likewise, a Catalan vostè construction can already resemble third-person agreement while directly addressing the reader. The Italian translation need not introduce a separate person referred to as he or she. The source title, salutation and conversational setting help establish that it is an address form.
This distinction is useful in short requests whose explicit pronoun is omitted. The verb ending can help recover grammatical person, but the actual recipient relationship must come from the communication. A source formal request can remain directed at the same individual even when its target agreement differs.
Italian Lei does not independently identify a woman
Molinelli explains courteous Lei as grammatically third-person feminine while distinguishing agreement with nominal and adjectival elements. Her example to a male doctor contains è stanco, with the adjective reflecting the male referent rather than mechanically becoming feminine because of Lei.
A Catalan source addressing a man respectfully should therefore not be interpreted as addressing a woman when the Italian target uses Lei. Conversely, the recipient’s identity should not be erased by a rule that every associated target word must mechanically copy the pronoun’s grammatical gender.
The same caution applies to Catalan possessives: seva agrees with the possessed noun and does not independently prove a female owner. Where a source request mentions the recipient’s item, identify the recipient and item separately before evaluating the Italian address and ownership expression.
Both languages can use third-person-looking material for direct address. Their similarities make a quick translation seem plausible, but they also make it easy to overlook an unintended switch between the recipient and somebody mentioned elsewhere.
A familiar relationship and a formal setting are separate cues
The Treccani account treats address selection as sensitive to the interlocutors’ relationship and communicative setting. The IEC similarly distinguishes the respectful tone associated with vós from the distancing potential of vostè. Neither source form is simply a numerical label.
A Catalan source using familiar tu should not automatically be made distant merely because the message concerns a professional topic. A formal source should not become intimate solely because the target omits an explicit pronoun. The translated verbs, titles and other address elements need to support the intended relationship together.
Molinelli notes that Italian courtesy pronouns can be explicit or recoverable from context and agreement. A target therefore need not repeat Lei in every clause to remain polite. What matters is the coherent address system.
For this direction, identify whether the source addresses one person or several, then distinguish its courtesy relationship from grammatical person and gender. Italian can preserve the Catalan recipient while changing the visible form of address, but an unnoticed change in audience or ownership would alter the message.
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