Fijian to Haitian Creole: a shorter pronoun can preserve the person but lose a group distinction
Fijian can distinguish roles through different pronoun forms
Joseph Hong lists separate Fijian subject and object pronouns. For third-person dual reference, his table gives e rau in the subject column and rau in the object column; for a few people it gives e ratou and iratou. Those contrasts concern both grammatical role and group reference. A Haitian Creole translation should recover both before deciding which visible forms to use.
Hong also explains that trial is a limited plural, not necessarily exactly three. When the source refers to a few people, preserve that small-group interpretation if it is important, without manufacturing an exact count. If the source literally specifies a pair, the translation should not silently expand the reference to an unrestricted gathering.
These decisions are independent of whether the people act or are affected. A Fijian sentence can describe two people seeing others or somebody seeing those two people. Keeping a pair visible while reversing the roles still gives the wrong event; keeping the roles while losing a practically relevant count loses different information.
Haitian Creole shares subject and object shapes
Dominique Fattier’s Haitian Creole survey notes that dependent personal pronouns do not distinguish subject from object forms. Its paradigm also gives nou for both first- and second-person plural reference, with context resolving which is intended. A target pronoun cannot therefore be interpreted through a Fijian-style assumption that a change of role necessarily requires a different shape.
The survey’s attested Nou doktè can mean either we are doctors or you are doctors. For Fijian input, that target ambiguity does not license changing who is included. Establish whether the source concerns the speaker’s group or the people addressed, and retain sufficient context to recover that participant relationship. A correct occupational noun cannot compensate for assigning the occupation to the wrong group.
Fattier also documents reduced pronouns in unstressed speech. A shortened form is not evidence that the translator has dropped a participant. Conversely, using a full form does not by itself restore a lost distinction between the source’s two-person and small-group categories. Pronoun length and participant number are separate properties.
Use the source clause to identify who sees whom
Arms describes the Standard Fijian verb-phrase core as a subject pronoun followed by a verb and an optional object. His simple example au raici ira means that the speaker sees them. That explicit source relationship must remain stable when Haitian Creole uses pronoun shapes shared across roles.
The surrounding Fijian clause can also contain markers before and after that core. Arms’s study examines those ordering possibilities; they are not additional people to place into a target pronoun paradigm. Resolve the subject, the action and its object before interpreting the remaining markers. For this direction, that prevents two shortcuts at once: treating every different Fijian pronoun shape as a different person, and assuming that identical-looking Haitian Creole pronouns must have the same role or reference in every occurrence.
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