Catalan to Samoan: family relationships and the people included in we
Catalan nosaltres does not identify everyone included
Catalan nosaltres identifies a first-person plural group without saying whether the listener belongs to it. The Peace Corps Samoan manual distinguishes inclusive from exclusive first-person forms and separates a pair from a larger group. A Catalan invitation using “we” can therefore leave two target decisions unstated: whether the listener is included and whether the group contains exactly two people. Resolve those questions from the invitation rather than from the plural verb alone.
The distinction is especially practical in a family visit. A Catalan message saying that “we” will visit can describe the speaker and the recipient, or the speaker and someone else who will visit the recipient. Those are different arrangements even if the Catalan pronoun is unchanged. A Samoan pronoun should preserve who is actually travelling, rather than accidentally adding the host to the group making the journey.
A child’s relationship can depend on the parent being described
Oranga Tamariki’s Samoan practice resource distinguishes afafine for a daughter in relation to her father from tama teine for a daughter in relation to her mother. It similarly lists atali‘i and tama tama for a son in those relationships. A Catalan kin term such as filla or fill does not encode that parental contrast in the word itself. Identify whose child is being discussed before choosing a target family expression.
This is not the same question as the child’s gender. A Catalan possessive can vary according to the noun it accompanies: CPNL gives la meva germana as an example in its possessive lesson. The feminine form does not establish that the person speaking is a woman. Likewise, a Catalan phrase about “my daughter” cannot be assigned the mother-oriented Samoan expression merely because the possessive is feminine. The parent’s identity comes from the referent, not that agreement ending.
The practice resource also distinguishes tama, which can refer to a child or boy, from tamā, father. A Catalan reader should not flatten the marked and unmarked forms into one familiar-looking spelling. They do not describe interchangeable family roles. The difference can matter in a brief family introduction even before the remainder of the sentence is considered.
Samoan marks are not the same convention as Catalan accents
Catalan graphic accents mark stressed syllables according to its orthographic rules. Samoan orthographic guidance treats long vowels and the glottal stop as significant aspects of writing. Preserving a Samoan macron is consequently not a stylistic preference for making a translated family word look more formal. Removing it can erase a distinction such as the one between tama and tamā.
The Ministry for Pacific Peoples also distinguishes written t-style from everyday k-style pronunciation, illustrating tama and its k-style pronunciation kama. The guidance generally recommends t-style in writing, with a possible exception for casual correspondence. For a Catalan reader hearing a family conversation, a spoken form that sounds different from the displayed translation need not indicate a different person or family relationship. Interpret the register and writing convention before changing the target spelling to imitate what was heard.
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