German to Bhojpuri: respect for a person discussed is separate from addressing the reader
Discussing a person is different from addressing that person
The German IDS description distinguishes anaphoric er, sie and es from pronouns referring to the current speaker or addressee. An anaphoric pronoun continues a person or thing already established in the text. It need not describe somebody taking part in the present conversation.
Bhojpuri honorification is relevant beyond direct address. Ruoan Wang’s account of Eastern Indo-Aryan systems presents two third-person honorific tiers for Bhojpuri, alongside four second-person tiers. Its Bhojpuri inventory is attributed to Lohar’s descriptive research. A choice about somebody being discussed is therefore not identical to a choice about how to address the reader.
For a German interview summary, identify the journalist, the interviewee and anybody mentioned inside the answer. If the interviewee describes a respected colleague, the colleague remains a third-person referent. Choosing respectful target wording should not turn the sentence into a direct message to that colleague or to the interviewee.
German reference cues do not settle a Bhojpuri social distinction
IDS records gender distinctions in German singular anaphoric pronouns and a gender-neutral plural sie. Those grammatical cues help recover who or what a pronoun refers to. They are not a set of labels for selecting the honorific tier in the Bhojpuri inventory.
A German paragraph can identify a colleague clearly while saying little about the speaker’s preferred social positioning toward that person. Do not convert the source’s grammatical gender into a target respect decision, or assume that a job title by itself fixes one universally appropriate form. The relevant relationship belongs to the actual exchange and the variety being used.
Wang also separates pronoun number from honorific verbal agreement in the described systems. A respectful verb form should not, by itself, be counted as evidence that the German sentence concerns several people. The number of participants and the social treatment of a participant must remain distinct in the review.
Keep the same cast when a report includes quotations
Imagine a German theatre review that quotes an actor talking about a director. Outside the quotation, the reviewer refers to the actor as sie. Inside it, the actor refers to the director with another third-person expression. The two pronouns can require different reference decisions even if their German spelling is identical.
Mark the quotation boundary before translating. Establish who supplies each judgement and who is being discussed. A respectful Bhojpuri expression in the actor’s quoted account should not silently become the reviewer’s personal judgement, and the director should not replace the actor as the speaker of the quotation.
Then check each person’s number and role independently of the chosen honorific wording. Does the passage still concern one actor and one director? Does it distinguish the person giving the interview from the person praised inside it? A socially appropriate-looking form cannot rescue a translation that changes those identities.
The tiered inventory is a descriptive starting point, not a universal etiquette chart. Where the German text leaves a target social choice unresolved, use reliable knowledge of the intended exchange rather than invent a relationship or flatten every third-person reference into the same form.
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