Danish to Albanian: an infinitive marker is not the same as a finite verb particle
A Danish bare infinitive can require a differently built complement
Danish distinguishes at as an infinitive marker and also allows modal verbs with bare infinitives. Its treebank documentation lists modal kunne with a bare infinitive among the auxiliary constructions. An Albanian translation should preserve the relation between the modal meaning and its action, but it should not assume that the action must remain in the same non-finite form.
The Albanian documentation describes duhet, expressing necessity, as combining with të and a finite verb. A Danish sentence meaning “The driver needs to wait” therefore requires more than a one-word substitution for “needs.” The action following the necessity expression belongs to an Albanian construction with its own verb form. The presence of të should not be treated as proof that the next word is simply a Danish-style infinitive.
The person who must act has to remain identifiable
Consider the difference between “I need to wait” and “The driver needs to wait.” Danish pronouns and noun subjects identify different actors while a bare infinitive can remain unchanged. In the Albanian necessity construction, the finite complement helps organize the action grammatically. Reusing the same fragment without regard to the intended participant can produce a sentence about someone else’s obligation.
This matters particularly when the Danish message distinguishes who gives an instruction from who performs it. “I say that the driver needs to wait” contains a speaker and a waiting participant. The source first-person subject is not evidence that the target waiting verb should refer to the speaker. Identify the subject of each proposition rather than carrying the most recent Danish pronoun indiscriminately through the Albanian complement.
Small Albanian forms must be interpreted by their surroundings
The same Albanian resource lists të before verbs as a particle, but also records të among forms used in adjectival and nominal constructions. It further distinguishes ma, combining first-person dative and third-person accusative pronouns, from ta when that form combines a particle with an object clitic. These small written units cannot all be read as identical counterparts of Danish at. Their grammatical environment determines what they contribute.
A Danish instruction meaning “Read it to me” contains both something read and a listener. A Danish statement meaning “It is necessary to read” need not contain that listener at all. An Albanian combined form involving a pronoun may therefore carry participant information absent from a superficially similar-looking verbal particle. Equally, a particle should not be expanded into a new person merely because another construction has a similar spelling. Track the Danish source’s action, actor, object, and recipient separately. That makes it possible to recognize a target complement with different internal grammar while retaining exactly who is required to do what, instead of evaluating the translation by whether every Danish infinitive has one visibly matching Albanian word.
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