German to Basque: who gave what to whom, and which participant is new information
German nominative does not map to one Basque ending
German grammar distinguishes subject, accusative and dative complements. Those roles help a reader identify an actor, an affected item and a recipient in many ordinary sentences. Translating the roles is useful; copying the German case labels directly into Basque is not a sufficient account of how the target marks them.
Laka’s university grammar contrasts umea in a falling event with emakumeak in a seeing event. The former subject is absolutive; the latter is ergative, while the object of seeing is absolutive. Basque thus treats these subject relationships differently from German nominative marking.
For a German report about an accident, determine whether someone fell or caused an action involving another participant. The target ending cannot be selected merely because the person occupies the first position in the source. A German subject and a Basque subject can represent the same person while participating in different case patterns.
A recipient belongs to the event even without its own pronoun
The Basque grammar’s giving example combines gizonak, umeari and liburua with eman dio: a man gives a book to a child. It explains that the auxiliary carries information about the subject, object and dative participant. These relationships are not limited to agreement with one subject pronoun.
German speaker and addressee pronouns distinguish ich, mich and mir, along with corresponding second-person forms. A German message can therefore spell out a recipient as a separate pronoun where Basque expresses participant information through its verbal construction and an understood reference. Missing a separate pronoun is not automatically missing a person.
For a German handover message, preserve three roles independently: the person handing something over, the item and the recipient. A compact Basque target can still contain all three relationships. Conversely, a target with several familiar noun translations can remain wrong if its agreement assigns the recipient role to the item or changes who performs the handover.
Do not omit the person who answers the question
Laka distinguishes understood participants from the informationally relevant phrase, called galdegaia. In the examples, a participant that supplies the answer to who saw the child must be overt even when verbal morphology already identifies it. Recoverability and communicative focus are consequently different reasons for including or omitting a phrase.
German IDS guidance notes that explicitly adding du or ihr to an ordinary imperative can underline the instruction. That provides a useful source-side warning: a separately expressed participant can do more than supply grammatical reference. A German message that deliberately singles out who should act needs the corresponding focus preserved in Basque, rather than only a form from which that person could be inferred.
When a German message corrects who delivered a book, the person is the useful new information. When it reports where the delivery happened, location may carry that role instead. Choose the Basque arrangement around the actual question being answered. Moving every German first-position phrase into a fixed target position can distort the contrast, while deleting every apparently redundant participant can remove the point of the message.
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