Catalan to Thai: not going and being unable to go need different constructions
The position of a Thai element can change the message
Hartmann and Hudak contrast Thai mây dây pay, did not go, with pay mây dây, cannot go. The order difference distinguishes an event that did not happen from an inability. Treating the expressions as the same negative merely because they contain similar pieces would erase the contrast.
Catalan marks these meanings with its own combinations of negation, tense, and modal verbs. A message that someone did not travel yesterday need not explain that travel was impossible. Conversely, a statement that someone cannot travel tomorrow is not evidence that tomorrow’s trip has already failed to happen. The Thai result must retain the source’s event status or constraint.
An anar auxiliary may describe a completed event
CPNL documents vaig comprar as a Catalan periphrastic past: the auxiliary derived from anar helps express a completed purchase. It does not assert a current intention to go shopping. A reader deciding how Thai pay functions cannot assume that every appearance of the Catalan go verb represents motion.
For an original Catalan account saying that a ticket was purchased but the journey did not occur, keep those two outcomes separate. Turning the purchase into a future shopping intention would destroy the chronology. Translating the journey’s negative as inability could additionally invent a reason. A missed journey might have been voluntary, while an inability might refer to a later planned journey whose outcome is still unknown.
Thai does not reproduce the Catalan tense ending
The NIU profile describes Thai time reference through separate elements, word order, and expressions identifying time, rather than inflection for tense. A target verb’s unchanged shape does not establish that a Catalan past became present. Read the surrounding temporal construction.
Catalan vaig comprar and a present purchase statement can therefore require target differences elsewhere than inside the purchase verb. In a sequence involving yesterday’s ticket and next week’s departure, preserve the temporal relationship of each event. Do not attach one time expression to the entire sequence if it would relocate the purchase or turn the departure into an event already completed. The source auxiliary’s function has to be interpreted before the target order is evaluated.
A source clitic can recover somewhere rather than something
CPNL’s hi vaig a peu uses hi to recover a destination and says that the journey is on foot. Its en torno example instead recovers an origin. These short expressions contain movement relationships that a translation must distinguish from a direct object.
In Thai, retaining pay somewhere in the output cannot by itself prove that either relationship survived. An account about going to the station and another about returning from it differ in direction. When one of those trips is negated, the translation must preserve both the correct movement relationship and the earlier distinction between not making the trip and being unable to make it.
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