Fijian to Danish: changing a report’s subject can change its possessive
Preserve the person behind a Fijian family reference
A Fijian message about a family member may be translated as a direct quotation or recast as a report. That change affects who counts as the speaker and who is the grammatical subject. In Danish, selecting a possessive before deciding those roles can make the family relationship point to the wrong person.
Joseph Hong illustrates tinaqu for my mother and ligaqu for my hand, with the possessive material attached to the noun. He contrasts these with separately expressed possessive forms for general objects, food and drink. The relationship is not conveyed by a free-standing equivalent of my in every Fijian phrase.
Consequently, the absence of a separate possessive word does not justify dropping the relationship from a Danish report. First establish whose mother or hand the source identifies. If someone forwards another person’s account, that original first-person reference should not silently become a reference to the person forwarding it.
Danish distinguishes reference to the subject from reference to someone else
Sproget.dk’s guidance for traditional Standard Danish uses sin when a singular subject is also the person whose possession or relationship is meant. Its bicycle example contrasts a girl’s own bicycle with another person’s bicycle. Choosing between reflexive and nonreflexive reference can therefore alter whose belongings the sentence identifies.
The guidance also shows why a rule based on the first person mentioned is insufficient: a main clause and a subordinate clause have their own subjects. In an example about a woman hearing news concerning her father, the possessive inside the subordinate clause is not selected simply by copying the main clause’s subject relationship.
The page explicitly notes regional variation and describes constructions with embedded nonfinite clauses that can remain ambiguous. It would be misleading to claim that every sin identifies one unique owner in every sentence. For a practical translation, rewording can be preferable when two people could plausibly be the intended reference.
Test the rewritten report against the original relationship
Consider an English outline of a Fijian exchange: one person says that their mother called, and another person reports that message. Keep those two people distinct while writing the Danish version. The reporting person is responsible for relaying the information; that does not make them the child of the caller.
If a rewritten sentence introduces another actor, check the family reference again. Would a reader connect it to the person speaking, the person being described, or the person inside the reported clause? Retain a name where necessary to resolve a genuine ambiguity. A fluent-looking possessive is useful only if it preserves the same relationship as the Fijian original.
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