Danish to Tahitian: who belongs to we, and where this is
Vi does not identify whether the listener belongs
Danish vi can include the listener or describe a group that excludes them. The Tahitian curriculum distinguishes tātou from mātou through inclusion versus exclusion. A Danish invitation saying that we are going somewhere therefore needs its participant group established before the Tahitian pronoun is chosen. A sender describing their own group’s trip is doing something different from proposing a trip shared with the reader.
This distinction can matter even when the Danish passage contains no invitation verb. A host’s statement about what we usually do might explain a household routine without inviting the visitor into the group. The Danish Language Council lists vi as a plural personal pronoun, but that form alone does not resolve the inclusion question. Use the actual relationship between speaker, listener and other participants rather than assume that friendly wording automatically means everyone is included.
Denne and den need a position in the conversation
The curriculum gives teie for something near the speaker, tenā for something near the addressee and terā for something distant. A Danish reference to this item or that item may consequently need a more specific account of where the item is situated relative to the participants. The contrast is not simply between a short Danish demonstrative and a longer Tahitian equivalent.
For a Danish exchange about objects being passed between people, track the item as well as its description. An object by the person writing and one by the person receiving the message can require different demonstratives even when both are relatively nearby. Choosing the target form from the source noun’s grammatical gender would miss this spatial relationship entirely.
A completed event is not necessarily an event before now
Atem and colleagues’ comparative study distinguishes aspect from temporal location. Its discussion of ’ua includes future contexts, so that particle cannot be decoded as an invariant past-tense label. A Danish arrangement describing what will already be done by a future meeting time needs the intended event relationship retained, not moved into the past simply because the target contains ’ua.
The study also illustrates an ongoing construction with Tē papa’i nei au i tā’u rata, describing writing a letter. For a Danish update about an activity underway, that perspective differs from merely reporting the activity as accomplished. Decide whether the writer presents a process, its realization or an event located relative to another event before matching individual tense words.
Small marks belong to the target words
The same study describes vowel length and the glottal stop written with the ’eta. In a Danish document, apostrophes often suggest punctuation around words; in Tahitian an apostrophe-like sign can instead represent part of the spoken word. Do not delete it while tidying the translation’s typography.
Danish possessives min and mit agree with the following noun, but their source forms do not determine the Tahitian particle or demonstrative choices described above. Keep ownership, participant inclusion, location and event perspective separate. A surface resemblance between two short grammatical words is insufficient to establish that the translated sentence retains the same relationship.
Language references