Dogri to Brazilian Portuguese: a clear owner can become ambiguous with seu
Addressing someone is not the same as describing someone else
A Dogri possessive can distinguish the person addressed from a third person whose property is being discussed. Sawhney’s description lists different second- and third-person genitive forms. Brazilian Portuguese can bring those references closer together: seu can be associated with a person addressed through você as well as a third-person possessor. An apparently straightforward possessive replacement can therefore introduce ambiguity that the Dogri wording did not contain.
Suppose a Dogri message tells a customer that another person has brought a document. If the Portuguese version uses seu for the document, the reader may connect it with the customer rather than the person bringing it. The important question is not whether the resulting noun phrase is grammatical. It is whether the original ownership relation remains identifiable.
A prepositional owner expression can make the reference explicit
Silva’s research on the D&G Natal corpus illustrates o seu filho alongside o filho dela. These are different ways of expressing possession; the latter places the owner expression after the noun. For a Dogri source with an established female third-person referent, the explicit form can preserve that reference when seu would be heard as addressing the reader.
The change involves more than swapping one possessive word. The prepositional construction follows the possessed noun, whereas a simple possessive can precede it. Dogri commonly places modifiers before their noun in Sawhney’s account. Keeping that source arrangement mechanically would miss the target construction’s organization. A clear rendering may move the ownership information to the other side of the noun.
The consultation by Carla Marques similarly explains how a Portuguese phrase can become ambiguous between third-person possession and possession by someone addressed through você or senhor. Its proposed disambiguation uses dele. This supports a practical choice when the owner is a specific previously mentioned man; it is not evidence that every instance of seu is wrong.
A regional corpus is evidence of variation, not a national ban
Silva analyzed forty spoken texts and their corresponding written versions from Natal, using late-twentieth-century data. The prepositional variant stood out in speech, while modality was the strongest of the investigated influences. Those findings help explain why an explicit owner construction can sound natural in a Brazilian message. They do not establish one compulsory possessive for every Brazilian speaker, region or present-day genre.
For Dogri-to-Brazilian-Portuguese translation, that scope matters when choosing between a conversational message and a more formal account. The translator should preserve the owner and select an appropriate construction without labeling an attested alternative foreign or incorrect merely because a different variant is frequent in one corpus.
A named owner and a general statement are different contexts
The research also discusses a distinction between reference to a particular antecedent and possessives linked to generic or quantified expressions. Consequently, replacing every seu with dele or dela is not a reliable global correction. A source describing a particular person’s document offers a different reference problem from a statement about what each person should bring.
Read the Dogri antecedent before choosing the Portuguese owner phrase. If the source explicitly addresses the reader, do not turn that instruction into a statement about another person’s property. If it describes a named third person, do not accidentally address the reader. This preserves the communicative relationship rather than merely making every possessive look consistent.
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