Fijian to Bulgarian: preserve what my fish is intended for
Possession can describe the intended relationship
Hong contrasts kequ ika with noqu ika: both associate fish with the speaker, but the first presents it as food for that person. His example of the second places fish in the speaker’s merchandise. That contrast matters in Bulgarian because a simple possessive meaning my does not automatically state that an item is reserved for the possessor to eat. A translation can retain the owner while losing the intended use.
Treat the merchandise interpretation as the situation described in Hong’s example, rather than a rule that every occurrence of noqu ika means fish for sale. His contrast demonstrates why possession cannot always be reduced to legal ownership. If the Fijian text distinguishes somebody’s meal from goods they control, the Bulgarian wording needs enough information to distinguish those relationships, without inventing a sale merely because the general possessive occurs.
Universal Dependencies lists Bulgarian мой and твой as long possessive determiners, meaning my and your. It distinguishes these from short possessive forms, which are clitics. These are Bulgarian ways of expressing a possessive relation; they are not equivalents of the Fijian division between food, drink and general possession. Selecting a long or short Bulgarian form does not, by itself, preserve the food relationship expressed in kequ.
A meal allocation is not an assertion that somebody ate
Schütz and Komaitai’s Fijian lessons also discuss possessive classification through the possessor’s relationship to an item. Their taro example distinguishes food from a marketable product, while tobacco illustrates why the traditional edible label cannot be interpreted as a literal test of what a person can swallow. In a Bulgarian rendering, describe the relationship actually established in the passage, rather than explaining the whole classification system as if every possessed noun needed a cultural footnote.
For example, reserving fish for somebody’s meal and reporting that they have eaten it are different claims. The Fijian food possessive can contribute to the first reading without independently establishing a completed eating event. A Bulgarian sentence that adds already eaten, purchased or cooked would introduce a new event. The translation problem is to retain the food allocation where it matters, not to replace a grammatical distinction with an unsupported story about preparation.
The same caution applies when several people handle the fish: the person carrying it, the person entitled to eat it and the person selling other fish need not be identical. A Bulgarian possessive that merely follows the nearest person mentioned could collapse those roles. Follow the Fijian possessive relationship through the exchange, then express the relevant entitlement or intended consumption explicitly if an ordinary possessive would leave the Bulgarian reader with a materially different understanding of whose meal is being discussed.
Language references