Catalan to traditional Mongolian: distinguish the actor’s own item from somebody else’s
A source possessive does not always identify its owner on its own
CPNL’s Catalan possessive table allows seu forms with third-person owners and explains their agreement with the possessed noun. A phrase such as el seu llibre therefore needs its owner identified from the surrounding passage. The adjective’s form alone cannot settle every possible antecedent.
Janhunen describes Mongolian reflexive possessor marking when the owner is coreferential with the clause’s subject. This creates a target choice requiring the translator to establish whether the source actor owns the item or whether another person does. Selecting a reflexive form from the presence of any Catalan possessive would add an unsupported relationship.
Returning one’s own book differs from returning a friend’s book
Consider an original Catalan account where a student returns their own book, compared with an account where the student returns a friend’s book. In both, the student performs the return. Only the first has the actor as possessor.
The Mongolian reflexive construction can make that distinction grammatically important. If the source names the friend as owner, retain the non-coreferential relationship. If the source clearly identifies the book as belonging to the student, preserve that relation rather than assigning it to another person mentioned nearby. An ambiguous Catalan seu should not be treated as evidence for either reading until its antecedent is established.
A reflexive marker does not independently count the owners
Janhunen explains that the reflexive possessor marker can refer to singular or plural possessors across grammatical persons. Its function concerns the relationship to the subject rather than a separate gender or person label for each owner. The subject and the clause still establish who owns the item.
In an original Catalan contrast between one traveler carrying their own bag and several travelers carrying their own bags, retain both the subject number and the number of possessions. A shared target reflexive pattern does not collapse the travelers into one person. Conversely, several bags do not establish that there are several owners. The target relationship must be interpreted with the subject and noun, not from the reflexive component alone.
Traditional written separation does not remove the grammatical relationship
Janhunen describes the traditional Written Mongol reflexive element as a graphic particle, contrasting its written treatment with Cyrillic Khalkha suffix spelling. He records different written shapes after vowel-final and consonant-final material. A visible separation is therefore not evidence that the possessive relation has vanished.
The Catalan source may use separate articles and possessives, while the traditional Mongolian expression organizes the corresponding information differently. Do not join or split target material merely to reproduce the Catalan spacing. Likewise, the Unicode technical note explains contextual shaping in Mongolian writing: a character’s visible form can depend on its written environment. A changed appearance is not enough to infer a changed owner. Establish the actor-owner relationship from the source, preserve subject and possession number independently, and read the complete traditional-script construction rather than treating its word boundaries or letter shapes as substitutes for grammatical interpretation.
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