Dogri to German: third-person reference needs more than a pronoun substitution
Near and distant reference do not select er or sie
Sawhney’s Dogri morphology paper lists third-person nominative e as proximate and o as distal. It describes the personal-pronoun system separately from the gender inflection found on nouns and adjectives. A German translation should therefore establish what the expression refers to before choosing a gendered third-person pronoun.
IDS describes German er, sie and es as anaphoric forms whose singular stems distinguish grammatical gender. They refer back to an established or otherwise available expression. The contrast between a nearer and a more distant Dogri reference cannot simply be converted into er versus sie: those German forms do a different grammatical job.
If a Dogri message contrasts a nearby object with another object farther away, preserve that contrast through the German description or pointing expression. Choosing two different German pronoun genders would identify grammatical categories, not automatically reproduce the spatial distinction. Both objects might require the same German gender, so distance must remain recoverable in another way.
Grammatical gender belongs to the German reference expression
German anaphoric pronouns inherit gender and number from a preceding expression in the account given by IDS. This is why the noun selected in the German translation matters. A pronoun should not be selected solely by treating an object as naturally male, female or neither.
Dogri’s paper explicitly notes that inanimate nouns have grammatical gender, giving rain and water as examples that do not follow a simplistic final-vowel prediction. Those source genders do not establish the grammatical gender of whichever German nouns express the same meanings. A shared referent is not a guarantee of identical noun classification.
For a paragraph describing an object and then referring to it again, choose the German noun phrase first. Subsequent pronouns should connect to that phrase consistently. If the source uses a different descriptive expression in a later sentence, examine whether it still identifies the same thing rather than interpreting every grammatical change as a new object.
A translation can thus preserve the referent while changing the gender marking visible on the page. The necessary consistency is between the German pronoun and its German reference expression, alongside a correct interpretation of the Dogri passage.
A bare nominative reference may not reveal the group’s size
Sawhney reports that the Dogri third-person nominative forms do not exhibit number agreement with the head nouns, while its oblique paradigm distinguishes forms such as issi and inẽ. The surrounding construction therefore matters when deciding whether a referent is one entity or several.
German distinguishes singular er, sie, es from plural sie, and finite verbal agreement can help distinguish singular sie from plural sie. The identical spelling of those two German sie forms should not conceal the number choice that the translated sentence still has to make.
For a Dogri account that introduces several people and later uses a short third-person reference, retain the established group unless the text signals a change. Do not make it singular merely because the nominative source pronoun looks short or invariant. Equally, an earlier plural group does not turn every later object reference into plural. Recover distance, identity and number from the source relationships before committing them to a German pronoun construction.
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