German to Amharic: who you means and where the recipient appears
German du leaves a distinction unstated
German IDS guidance distinguishes du, plural ihr and formal Sie as ways of referring to an addressee. The ordinary singular du does not identify that person as male or female. Its case forms dich and dir change the grammatical role without supplying that distinction either.
The Amharic Universal Dependencies documentation presents separate singular addressee forms antä and anči, and distinguishes masculine and feminine second-person forms in its verbal paradigms. The target can therefore require participant information that the German pronoun does not explicitly carry. This is not a reason to infer the participant from an unrelated person mentioned nearby.
For a German message reporting what somebody told you, identify the recipient of the telling separately from the speaker. If a woman relays a man’s words to another woman, the target form for you concerns the recipient, not the man whose words are reported. German grammatical person is useful evidence, but it does not complete every target choice.
Sie gehen can address one person
IDS explicitly states that formal German Sie takes third-person plural agreement regardless of whether its actual addressee is singular or plural. Its examples contrast a singular reader with several readers while preserving that grammatical pattern. Counting the German verb ending as the number of customers would consequently be misleading.
Before translating formal correspondence into Amharic, establish whether Sie addresses one person, a household or an organization’s staff. The source’s formal grammar identifies a social address choice; it does not automatically establish a group of people. A target sentence should not multiply the participants solely because the German verb looks plural.
The same distinction matters in quotations. German Sie can belong to somebody else’s direct address inside a report. The person translating the report is not thereby addressing the reader of the final message. Keep the quoted speaker and quoted recipient together when resolving the target pronouns, rather than treating every second-person form as a reference to the present customer.
The object may be attached to the target verb
The Amharic documentation gives nägäräňə for he told me and contrasts nägärəkuhə with nägärəkušə for telling a masculine or feminine singular addressee. It distinguishes bound subject agreement from object clitics. These grammatical components can appear within a single written verb rather than as separate words matching German pronouns.
A German dative recipient such as mir therefore need not retain its own separate space in Amharic. Conversely, finding the person’s information somewhere in the target verb is not enough: it must identify the same participant in the same role. A form meaning I told you cannot replace he told me merely because both contain a speaker-related component.
For short German service messages, map the telling event before evaluating word count: who supplied the information, who received it, and whether either participant is explicitly named elsewhere. The Amharic target can package those roles more compactly. Its agreement and recipient element must nevertheless preserve the German distinction between the person giving an explanation and the person receiving it.
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