Estonian to Icelandic: preserve who likes something when case and agreement differ
The person doing the liking need not look like a basic subject
The Estonian explanatory dictionary illustrates meeldima with Turistidele meeldib Tallinna vanalinn: the tourists like Tallinn’s old town. The tourists are the people experiencing the positive reaction, while the old town is what they like. A translation into Icelandic must retain that relationship even if the target’s grammatical description does not assign exactly the same labels to the two participants. Starting with the first noun and automatically treating everything else as an ordinary object can obscure the construction.
The dictionary also gives Talle meeldib väga reisida for liking travel. Here the source describes enjoyment of an activity rather than liking a particular person or object. For Icelandic, identify the content of the preference before choosing its complement. A statement that somebody likes another person and one saying that somebody likes travelling cannot be distinguished merely by copying the Estonian ending on the experiencer. The positive response, its experiencer and the person, thing or activity that prompts it all need to remain identifiable.
A plural Icelandic verb does not necessarily mean several experiencers
Hlíf Árnadóttir and Einar Freyr Sigurðsson study Icelandic dative–nominative constructions, including the verb for liking. Their opening examples describe one person liking several cars. For many speakers, the verb can agree in number with the nominative cars, although the experiencer is singular and dative. Thus, a plural-looking target verb does not by itself show that an Estonian singular experiencer has been mistranslated as a group.
The authors explicitly discuss variation: some speakers prefer agreement, some allow a singular default as well, and the distribution changes with the construction. They also distinguish the active liking pattern from a passive involving giving, where the agreement requirements are different. An Estonian reader should therefore avoid imposing a universal “agree with the nearest person” rule on the Icelandic output. Read which predicate is present and which noun controls the relevant agreement. The existence of variation in one construction does not license freely replacing number forms throughout the translated sentence.
A second verb can require the same person in another case
Einar Freyr Sigurðsson and Jim Wood’s discussion of Icelandic case syncretism considers coordinated clauses in which a person arrives and then experiences boredom. Their Guðmundur example raises a case mismatch: the name is nominative with arriving, whereas the second predicate requires a dative participant. Their comparison with Sif involves a name whose forms coincide across several cases. They present the improved acceptability as a possibility requiring further systematic investigation, rather than an established unrestricted rule.
This matters for an Estonian narrative that mentions a person once and continues with another predicate. The Icelandic translation may need to express that person again in a different form, even though the Estonian sentence is compact. Such repetition can preserve the intended experiencer instead of adding a new participant. Conversely, an apparently unchanged Icelandic name may conceal a case distinction because its forms coincide. Evaluate the relationship required by each predicate, rather than insisting that the same person must always have the same visible form whenever mentioned in one sentence.
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