Catalan to Russian: distinguish an actual journey from a past-tense auxiliary
Vaig does not always mean that somebody went somewhere
Catalan uses forms related to anar to construct the periphrastic past. CPNL contrasts the present movement verb with this auxiliary use and gives vaig comprar in its past-tense table. The expression reports buying; it does not independently add a journey to the shop. A Russian translation should not introduce a motion verb simply because the Catalan auxiliary resembles go.
Compare a message reporting a purchase with one explicitly reporting going somewhere to buy something. The second contains a movement event that the first need not contain. An online purchase, for instance, can be described without anyone travelling. Adding a journey would create a factual detail absent from that source.
The same caution applies to a sequence of Catalan past actions. A repeated auxiliary may organize the narrative rather than describe repeated departures. Identify which infinitives actually concern movement before choosing Russian movement vocabulary.
When the source really describes travel, read the whole trip
Russian distinguishes basic motion verbs such as идти and ходить, and separately ехать and ездить. Mango’s teaching reference explains directionality and the usual contrast between walking and vehicle travel. It also shows that the multidirectional forms can describe regular journeys or summarize a visit followed by return.
For a Catalan message about yesterday’s visit, determine whether the writer is describing being on the way or looking back on the outing as a whole. A sentence interrupted by a telephone call during the journey differs from a summary of visiting a friend and returning home. Yesterday alone does not identify which perspective is intended.
Likewise, a regular commute and a particular journey in progress can share the same Catalan destination. Russian verb choice should preserve whether the message announces a habit or locates someone within one trip. Do not convert an ordinary schedule into a claim that the traveller is currently moving.
Transport clues help, but mechanical rules still fail
Mango notes conventional uses of the walking-series verbs for activities such as attending the cinema even when transport is involved. It also illustrates идти and ходить with a bus or train as grammatical subject. Consequently, interpreting either series as an infallible statement about human footsteps produces errors.
A Catalan travel plan may explicitly mention a bicycle, bus, or walking route. Keep that detail when it matters to the request. But a statement that a train operates daily is about the service, not a passenger walking each day. Identify who or what is moving before judging the target verb.
For practical directions, distinguish the vehicle’s operation from the traveller’s journey and the purpose of a visit. Someone asking about a daily train service needs a different answer from someone announcing that they are on a train now. A dependable translation starts with those event distinctions, then expresses them in Russian; it does not build the story by replacing every occurrence of Catalan anar with the same Russian verb.
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