Dogri to Polish: whose reasons, whose belongings and whose point of view
A possessive can point back to the person acting
A Dogri account can mention two people before saying that one of them collected his belongings. The important question is whether the belongings belong to the person collecting them or to the other person. A Polish possessive choice can make that relationship more explicit, so identifying the owner must come before selecting a familiar word for his.
Swan’s Polish grammar explains the subject-related possessive “swój”, with forms including “swoja” and “swoje”. His example “On ma swoje zalety” connects the good points to the subject himself. Substituting the ordinary third-person possessive changes that relationship in the interpretation he describes.
For a Dogri message about a student collecting a teacher’s materials, do not make those materials the student’s own simply because the student performs the action. Conversely, if the student collects personal belongings, a target expression pointing to somebody else would misidentify the owner. The same collection event can therefore remain grammatically plausible while becoming practically wrong.
Agreement with a possession does not identify its owner
Sawhney’s Dogri description explains that genitive marking agrees with the head noun in gender, number and case. A feminine form can consequently follow the grammatical properties of the possession rather than establish that its owner is female. Treating that form as an owner label would start the Polish translation from the wrong person.
Swan’s paradigm also shows the reflexive possessive changing with its grammatical environment. These changes do not create a series of different owners. Separate the question of who owns something from the form required alongside the target noun.
Imagine a lost-property message referring first to a bag and then to several documents inside it. The owner may remain the same even though the target noun phrase changes. A change in the possessive form is not, by itself, evidence that the documents belong to another participant.
If the Dogri conversation actually contrasts two owners, preserve the contrast explicitly enough to be understood. Repeating a person’s name can be more useful than allowing an unresolved his or her to attach to whichever nearby noun a reader happens to notice.
My own does not always need a separate word meaning my
The Polish grammar also illustrates “Ja mam swoje powody”, where the speaker has personal reasons. The subject-related possessive can refer back to a first-person subject, not only to a third-person man mentioned earlier. It should therefore not be treated as a fixed translation of his.
For a Dogri explanation of a personal decision, establish whether the writer gives personal reasons or reports someone else’s. A mechanically selected third-person owner could make the speaker appear to borrow another person’s justification.
Swan distinguishes emphatic possession from ordinary use as well. Do not add an insistence on exclusive ownership merely because the source mentions a belonging. A simple reminder to collect personal papers and a dispute insisting that papers belong to the writer have different conversational purposes.
Read the result by following the owner across the action: who decides, who collects, and whose reasons or belongings are involved. This keeps subject reference, noun agreement and emphasis from being collapsed into one guess based on a short possessive form.
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