Finnish to Slovak: a personal ending and a short pronoun follow different placement rules
Short source packaging does not determine target word order
Finnish can put personal information inside a word. Kielibuusti gives minun kanssani, with me, as an example containing a possessive suffix on a postposition. The person is a companion, not the owner of something called with. A Slovak translation must preserve that relationship without assuming that an equally short pronoun can be placed anywhere.
Slovake.eu contrasts Vidím ťa and Vidím teba, both identifying the addressee as the person seen. Its lesson explains that the short form cannot begin the sentence, while the full form can. This target distinction concerns grammatical placement and emphasis, not a different person. The two languages’ compact personal expressions therefore cannot be exchanged by matching their lengths or positions.
A preposition can require a different target pronoun form
The Slovak lesson separately identifies forms used with prepositions and illustrates Idem k nemu, going to him. A source reference to a person can thus require more than replacing one Slovak pronoun with another from the same dictionary entry. Its relation to a preposition matters.
For Finnish-to-Slovak translation, determine whether the source person is the subject, the person seen, a destination participant or a companion. Finnish case endings and postpositions can distinguish these relationships within expressions that have very different surface shapes from their target counterparts. Preserving the person’s identity while assigning the wrong relationship is still a substantive translation error.
White’s Finnish textbook helps keep destination and location apart. It pairs forms answering where to with forms answering where, and discusses käydä for visiting or making a round trip. A sentence describing a visit to somebody must not be rebuilt as a statement about accompanying that person simply because both use an oblique personal form. Read the motion verb and personal expression together.
The same Finnish suffix can occur in another grammatical job
Kielibuusti explains that personal possessive suffixes also occur on some non-finite verb forms, where they identify the actor of an embedded action. In hankkiessasi pesukonetta, the ending identifies who acquires the washing machine. This is neither an ordinary object pronoun nor a simple statement of ownership.
A Slovak rendering of a longer Finnish instruction should preserve that embedded actor independently from anyone mentioned in the main clause. An addressee carrying out the acquisition and another person accompanying them have different roles. Compressing both into an undifferentiated personal reference could assign the purchase to the companion.
The source lesson also notes that first- and second-person possessor pronouns may be omitted when suffixes identify the owner, but retained for contrast. An explicit Finnish pronoun can therefore carry emphasis even when its person information is already recoverable. Slovak short-versus-full pronoun choices must fit the relevant construction; copying the Finnish omission or moving a short target form to the front does not automatically preserve that emphasis.
Keep these functions distinct as the sentence is rebuilt: the owner of an item, the actor of an embedded action and a person related through a preposition. The Finnish endings can look similar while contributing different relationships, and the Slovak forms need to express the relationship actually present.
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