Catalan to Kazakh: possessions and noun roles move into different structures
A Catalan possessive has several separate pieces of information
Catalan el meu and la meva both refer to a first-person possessor, while the different forms agree with the thing possessed. CPNL’s possessive table makes this distinction explicit. Kazakh does not have grammatical gender, according to its Universal Dependencies documentation. Therefore a feminine Catalan possessive should not be interpreted as identifying a female owner, and its feminine form need not receive a separate gender marker in Kazakh. What matters is who possesses what.
The target also combines possession with grammatical case. Akmaral Mukanova’s Kazakh teaching guide treats third-person possessives in locative, accusative and dative constructions as separate learning topics. A Catalan phrase about someone’s school can consequently take different Kazakh forms depending on whether the school is a location, an object or a destination. Preserving the owner does not mean freezing the noun in one form throughout the translation.
Prepositions are relationships, not positions to preserve
The Catalan article lesson shows a l’avinguda beside al mercat and del parc. These expressions combine prepositions and articles according to Catalan spelling and syntax. Kazakh grammatical descriptions instead identify cases such as dative, locative and ablative. Translate the relationship expressed by the Catalan phrase: a destination, a location and a source are different roles. Copying the source preposition into a separate Kazakh-looking word would bypass that grammatical decision.
Kazakh morphology also changes the visible shape of suffixes. Sundetova, Forcada and Tyers illustrate plural formation with кітаптар and мектептер. The different endings reflect the surrounding sounds rather than different quantities. For a Catalan reader used to plural articles such as els, these examples explain why the same general plural meaning may not have one invariant written ending in the target. They are formation examples, not a rule for adding Catalan letters to Kazakh nouns.
An adjective and its noun form a translated unit
Catalan feminine and plural agreement can make the boundaries of a descriptive phrase visible. Kazakh reorganizes such phrases: the original translation-system study describes modifiers preceding the noun and target-specific morphological choices. Identify which noun an adjective actually describes before interpreting the new order. A description of a person and a description of a place can call for different lexical choices, even if the Catalan adjective happens to be the same.
This matters when a Catalan text contains several adjacent noun phrases. Moving an adjective without preserving its attachment can change who or what receives the description. The useful comparison is between the complete source phrase and the complete Kazakh phrase, rather than between their first words. Target order and suffixes may jointly carry relationships that Catalan expresses through a different arrangement of articles, prepositions and agreement.
Digits can belong to a larger written word
The Kazakh UD guide gives 100-ге as an example in which a suffix attaches to a numeral through a hyphen. Catalan readers should not automatically treat that hyphen as a subtraction sign or an accidental break in the number. The quantity and the grammatical ending have different jobs. In a translated phrase containing a numbered amount or designation, preserve the number while recognizing that Kazakh may attach grammatical material to it.
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