Filipino to Croatian: whose book is it when the owner is also the reader?
Filipino niya does not decide between Croatian his and her
NIU’s table gives Filipino niya for a third-person singular participant without distinguishing male and female. In a possessive use, it can correspond to his or her, while nila identifies a plural third-person possessor. A Croatian translation cannot infer the owner’s gender merely from niya. More importantly, gender is not the only decision: Croatian also distinguishes ownership belonging to the sentence’s subject from ownership belonging to somebody else.
The Croatian school grammar illustrates this with Lucija reading a book. Its example Lucija čita njezinu knjigu identifies another female person as the owner; Lucija čita svoju knjigu makes the book Lucija’s own. Both are grammatical descriptions of reading, but they do not identify the same owner. An apparently small possessive choice can therefore change whether someone is reading personal property or a borrowed book.
Identify the subject before selecting a reflexive possessive
This distinction becomes especially useful when translating from Filipino because the source’s participant markers and verbal construction must be interpreted before the target clause is arranged. NIU separately demonstrates that an ng-form pronoun may identify an actor, not just an owner. Reading every occurrence of niya as a possessive would obscure the person performing the action before the translator even reaches the Croatian ownership decision.
Imagine a Filipino account in which a named person reads a book and a following possessive refers back to that same person. If the Croatian translation makes that reader the subject, the reflexive possessive can preserve the same-owner relationship. If the possessive instead points to another person already mentioned, choosing the reflexive form would collapse two people into one. The necessary evidence is reference in the Filipino conversation, not simply the presence of a third-person form.
The Croatian description applies svoj across grammatical persons, rather than reserving it for an English-style himself or herself. Thus a first-person Filipino possessive does not automatically require the ordinary Croatian word for my in every construction either. What matters is whether the possessive refers to the Croatian subject. A translation must preserve who owns the item even if the target uses a less visibly person-specific possessive expression.
The ending also describes the possessed noun
The Croatian paradigm shows forms such as svoj, svoja and svoje, with further changes for case and number. These forms are not alternative genders of the owner. Once the translator has established that the subject owns the item, the possessive still has to fit the noun phrase in which it appears. Filipino’s unchanged possessive pronoun does not supply those target endings directly.
For a reading or borrowing message, separate three questions: which person owns the book, whether that person is also the Croatian subject, and what form the Croatian book phrase requires. Answering only the first with a guessed his or her misses the reflexive contrast. Answering only the last can produce polished agreement around the wrong owner. Preserving all three allows the translation to retain the distinction between one’s own reading material and another person’s property.
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