Czech to Sesotho: identifying people through relative clauses
Find the role of the person being described
Czech Universal Dependencies illustrates a relative clause with Viděl jsem muže, kterého miluješ: I saw the man whom you love. The man is the person being described, but the understood you is the actor of loving. Identifying these two roles is essential before translating the relative construction into Sesotho.
Mischke’s study of Southern Sotho relatives distinguishes structures in which the head noun is qualified directly from structures involving another referent as the grammatical subject of the relative. A Czech relative pronoun should therefore not be replaced with a single Sesotho form without examining the embedded clause. A description of the person who sent a parcel differs from a description of the person whom somebody sent.
A subject marker inside the relative can refer elsewhere
Mischke describes an indirect relative with an introductory element related to a demonstrative, followed by subject marking associated with the embedded subject. Her discussion includes Ngwana eo nkgono a mo fepang, the child whom the grandmother feeds. The child remains the head being qualified; the grandmother supplies the subject of feeding.
Applied to a Czech message about collecting a visitor, the person to be collected may be the head noun while a driver is the embedded actor. A target construction that makes the visitor the actor would send the instruction in the opposite direction. Follow the complete relative clause, including any overt embedded participant, rather than assuming that the noun immediately before it must perform its action.
Passive descriptions do not change who is affected
The dissertation explicitly discusses the difference between grammatical subject and semantic actor when comparing active and passive relatives. A person described as being fed can be the grammatical subject of a passive description without becoming the person who supplies the food.
Czech likewise distinguishes passive constructions in its grammatical documentation. For an original description of a customer who was contacted by a technician, the customer remains the contacted person even if a target construction reorganizes the clause. Calling a relative direct does not authorize converting the customer into the caller. Preserve the event roles independently of the grammatical labels used by a particular reference grammar; these labels describe structures, not a universal equation between subject and initiator.
A clause may describe a kind of person rather than select one
Mischke’s discourse analysis also distinguishes identifying a referent from characterizing one. Her findings are presented as an analysis of observed Southern Sotho discourse, rather than an instruction to choose a construction from an English translation alone.
An original Czech recommendation might identify the employee who repaired a particular machine, distinguishing that employee from colleagues. Another sentence might describe the same already identified employee as someone who repairs machines well. The first relative helps select the person; the second adds a characteristic. Do not add an implication that only one employee has that ability if the Czech source merely praises someone already under discussion. The target relative needs to preserve the role of the description in the message as well as the participants in the action.
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