Czech to traditional Mongolian: whose own, oneself, or each other?
Czech reflexive words do not all express ownership
Czech uses se and si with several functions, while svůj is a reflexive possessive. Universal Dependencies documents literal self-directed actions, reciprocal actions, reflexive passives, and verbs whose reflexive element belongs to the lexical construction. These distinctions must survive translation into traditional Mongolian even though English explanations may loosely call all of them reflexive.
Compare the documented Czech smála se, she laughed, with ublížila si, she hurt herself. The first does not assert an action directed at a separate object called herself; the second does identify the affected person with the actor. A target word or ending associated with reflexivity cannot be inserted mechanically for every occurrence of the Czech clitic. Determine the source construction before deciding how Mongolian should represent its participants.
Ownership concerns a different relationship
Janhunen describes a Mongolian reflexive possessor marker for a nominal or nominalized expression whose possessor refers back to the clause subject. His romanized ger-ee/n illustrates one’s own home. This is an ownership relationship rather than an assertion that the home acts upon itself.
For an original Czech scenario, a worker can damage their own tool without injuring themselves. Another worker can injure themselves using somebody else’s tool. The source distinguishes the owner of the tool from the person affected by the action. Traditional Mongolian needs to preserve those two relationships separately. Translating a possessive relationship as a reflexive object, or treating any self-directed action as proof that a nearby object belongs to the actor, would alter what happened.
Each other is not simply everybody acting alone
The Czech documentation illustrates reciprocal se with people kissing each other. Janhunen separately describes reciprocal constructions involving a repeated Mongolian expression historically based on body or self.
A Czech account in which two colleagues help each other distributes the action between participants. It does not mean that each colleague works entirely alone, nor that both help a third person. If an earlier sentence supplies the plural actor, that reference must remain available when the reflexive expression is interpreted. The translation should distinguish mutual participation from individually self-directed actions; preserving a general idea of plurality is not enough to recover that difference.
Traditional spelling does not reproduce Czech word boundaries
Janhunen notes that Written Mongol renders reflexive possession with a graphic particle, including combinations with case markers, whereas Cyrillic Khalkha normally writes the reflexive ending within the preceding word. His grammatical romanization is explanatory notation rather than text to paste as traditional-script output.
A Czech editor may see a short separate expression in the traditional result and assume it corresponds to se or si. That visual resemblance provides no reliable identification: the expression may instead belong to the possessed nominal. Read it with the noun and its grammatical relationship. Changing spacing to imitate the Czech clitic, or splitting a verbal expression merely because the source contains two words, can obscure the target construction without improving the translation.
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