German to Xhosa: verb extensions can change who benefits or sees
Sehen and zeigen do not describe the same event
German uses different lexical verbs for seeing and showing. The SADiLaR isiXhosa morphology resource illustrates a corresponding distinction through a derived stem: -bon-a means see, while -bon-is-a means show. The added material changes the relationship between the participants, not just the time of the event. A translation that retains a recognizable seeing root but omits the derivation can therefore change what somebody does.
Compare the original German requests Sieh das Bild an and Zeig mir das Bild. In the first, the listener is asked to look; in the second, the listener makes the picture available for the speaker to see. A Xhosa translation must preserve that difference. Sharing part of a root across the target expressions is not evidence that the two requests are interchangeable. Identify who sees and who brings about the seeing.
Für jemanden and füreinander assign different beneficiary relations
The portal also gives -akh-el-an-a with the meaning build for each other. This illustrates how extensions can contribute relationships that German might express with separate words. German füreinander includes reciprocity in the beneficiary relationship; it is not simply another way to say that several people build at the same time. The complete Xhosa stem needs to retain the intended relation.
An original German community project description can distinguish building together from building for one another. The first concerns cooperation in the activity; the second additionally identifies who benefits from whose work. Replacing both with a generic plural building statement would preserve the workers but lose the relationship among them. Likewise, translating a German sentence about building for one named family with a reciprocal construction could wrongly imply that the family also builds for the other participants.
Agreement and derivation answer different questions
SADiLaR’s description separates subject and object concords from the root and the extension suffixes in the verbal structure. Concord identifies grammatical links to participants; an extension can alter the predicate’s relations. These are different kinds of information. A correct subject concord does not by itself prove that a German causative or beneficiary meaning has been preserved.
This matters in instructions containing both an explicit recipient and a derived action. A German supervisor may ask someone to show visitors a room, rather than ask the visitors to look for the room themselves. The target needs to assign the action to the instructed person and the relevant experience to the visitors. Check both the concord links and the derived stem’s contribution. German may distribute those clues across separate verbs, pronouns and prepositional phrases, whereas isiXhosa can package several of them into the verb. The shorter appearance of a target clause is acceptable only when it retains the same participant relations; recognizing one familiar root is not enough to establish that.
Language references