Catalan to Romanian: a word before a person’s name can mark a different relationship
A personal article is not the Romanian object marker
Catalan CPNL describes personal articles used with people’s names, including el, la, en, and na, with regional differences. Their presence should not be interpreted as an instruction to insert one Romanian word before every corresponding name. A name’s role in its sentence still matters.
Romanian pe can mark particular direct objects. Ticio and Avram illustrate the contrast with Ion a desenat pe Maria, where Maria is the person drawn. Their corresponding ordinary house object does not take that marking. The target distinction concerns the object construction and its reference, not simply whether a Catalan personal article appeared in the source.
The same person can be subject in one clause and object in another
Imagine an original Catalan account saying that Maria drew a colleague and that the colleague later drew Maria. Personal articles may accompany the names according to the source variety. Keeping those articles consistent does not identify which person performs each drawing.
In Romanian, the person represented by a name as the direct object belongs to an environment where pe marking matters. The subject’s name has a different role. Copying a marker before both names, or stripping it from both because the names themselves are unchanged, would confuse the two constructions. Read the drawing event’s actor and depicted person separately before judging the target’s extra material around either name.
A pronoun beside the full name need not add another person
Ticio and Avram discuss accusative clitic doubling with marked objects. Romanian UD likewise describes weak object forms occurring alongside an explicit noun or another pronoun naming that object. Such a clitic can refer to the same participant already identified by the full expression.
Catalan also uses weak pronouns to recover participants, but a reader should not demand identical distributions across the two languages. If a Romanian clause contains an object clitic and the colleague’s name, counting them as two colleagues would misread the construction. Conversely, removing the clitic merely to make the target match the source’s word count may damage the target grammar. Establish whether both forms identify the same object before revising the sentence.
A description of a person is not identical to a personal name
The Romanian study distinguishes obligatory marking environments involving animate personal names from environments involving full descriptions, where the distribution can differ. It does not support a rule that every phrase mentioning a human takes pe in exactly the same way.
A Catalan account might first name Maria, then call her the person in the room, and later refer back with a pronoun. The real person remains constant, but the expression identifying her changes grammatical type. Romanian object marking must be evaluated with that expression and its context. Preserve the source’s choice between naming someone, describing an identifiable person, and introducing an unspecified person; changing all three into the same target pattern would erase distinctions the writer actually supplied.
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