Czech to Malagasy: changing voice need not hide the person who acted
Follow the buyer, the clothes and the beneficiary
A Czech sentence about buying something can introduce three participants: the buyer, the purchased item and the person for whom it was bought. A Malagasy translation can organise those participants through different voice constructions. Do not assume that every non-active form is an attempt to conceal the buyer or avoid responsibility.
Keenan and Manorohanta illustrate this with a single purchase involving Vao, clothes and a child. Their active example begins with nividy, while a patient-oriented version contains novidín’i Vao. A third construction gives the child the external grammatical position. The event remains a purchase by Vao for the child; the organisation changes.
For a Czech message about a school donation, keep those three roles distinct. The person purchasing clothing, the clothing itself and the child receiving the benefit are not interchangeable. A target sentence centred on the clothing should not be interpreted as saying that the clothing performed the purchase.
An expressed agent is compatible with non-active voice
The researchers’ text study finds Malagasy non-active constructions frequently accompanied by agent phrases. Their comparison concerns English, German and Dutch, rather than a measured Czech corpus. The useful point for this direction is therefore a caution about interpretation, not a numerical claim about how often Czech and Malagasy choose particular voices.
If the Czech source names the organiser who bought the donation, a Malagasy non-active construction can still retain that information. Rejecting it merely because it resembles an English passive would confuse a grammatical choice with an omission. Check whether the buyer is actually expressed before concluding that the translation has removed the organiser.
Conversely, grammatical well-formedness is not enough if the source deliberately leaves the buyer unidentified. Adding a named agent from a previous conversation can introduce a claim that the present message never makes. Preserve both the event roles and the source’s actual level of commitment about who filled them.
Relative descriptions can require a different voice
Keenan and Manorohanta show a connection between voice and relative-clause formation: in their examples, the relativised position is the external argument. A phrase describing the person who bought the clothing therefore has a different structural basis from a phrase describing the clothing bought by that person. One cannot freely exchange the head noun while keeping the rest of the construction unchanged.
A Czech inventory note may need to identify the donated clothes rather than tell the story of their purchase. When the target uses a relative description to identify those clothes, its voice choice may follow that grammatical requirement. It need not signal a newly impersonal attitude toward the donor.
Read the finished note by asking which object the description identifies and which person carried out the purchase. If a relative phrase accidentally identifies the buyer instead of the clothes, the inventory reference has changed. Maintaining the event map across both the main sentence and its identifying description gives readers a usable account of what was bought, by whom and for whose benefit.
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