German to Lingala: a subject pronoun and a verb prefix can identify the same participant
A repeated personal reference is not a second actor
German finite verbs can mark person and number while the sentence also contains a separately written subject pronoun. Lingala likewise can identify the participant through more than one grammatical piece, but the relevant personal information is organized through verb prefixes rather than a copied set of German endings. The presence of a pronoun and a prefix need not introduce two different people.
Eyamba Bokamba’s personal paradigm includes Bísó with to- for we and Bínó with bo- for plural you in the examples of taking. These are not variants distinguished only by whether the German word looks singular or plural. They identify different participant groups: the speaker’s group and the people being addressed. A German translation must retain that person distinction as well as the number.
German formal agreement does not automatically identify a third-person group
German formal Sie combines with third-person plural verb agreement even when it addresses one person. The German documentation explicitly separates its second-person meaning from that surface agreement. A Lingala translation should therefore not select a third-person plural reference just because the German verb has a plural ending. The source could be speaking to a customer rather than talking about a group.
Compare the meanings “You took the documents” in a formal address and “They took the documents” in a report. Both can look similar in German, but the conversation assigns different roles. The Lingala personal prefix and any independent reference have to preserve whether the writer addresses the taker or mentions somebody else. Adding a second personal expression will not repair a wrong participant assignment if both expressions still point to the wrong group.
Noun-class agreement is a further system, with variety-specific patterns
Bokamba distinguishes personal agreement from wider noun-class agreement and documents substantial differences among Literary, Spoken, and Kinshasa Lingala in the material examined. His account describes consistent human personal paradigms alongside more variable agreement involving other noun classes in certain varieties. These observations should not be replaced by an assertion that all Lingala either has full uniform agreement or has none.
A German report can move from people taking documents to the documents being available. In the first clause the people are actors; in the second the documents are the relevant subject matter. German masculine, feminine, and neuter noun genders do not supply a conversion table into Lingala classes. Nor does an agreement pattern found in a Literary example automatically establish that a different Spoken form is meaningless. Preserve the source distinction between actors and items while evaluating the target in its intended variety. The same German personal verb ending and a noun’s article answer different questions; Lingala personal prefixes and noun-class concord likewise must be interpreted in their own grammatical environments. That prevents a mechanically aligned translation from adding people, changing addressees, or forcing one documented variety’s complete agreement pattern onto another.
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