Spanish to Dogri: a person’s name can change with its grammatical role
Spanish personal a does not always mark a recipient
Spanish uses a before personal names functioning as direct objects, as the RAE illustrates with Vi a Pedro en el cine. Pedro is the person seen, not the destination of the seeing. A Dogri translation should identify that participant relationship before choosing a case or postpositional construction. The presence of Spanish a alone is not evidence that somebody receives an object.
A Spanish sentence can also contain a recipient introduced by a, so the verb and the whole clause matter. Seeing a person and giving something to a person involve different roles even when both contain the same preposition. Translating each a as the same Dogri fragment would conceal that difference.
A target proper name is not always an unchanged label
Udita Sawhney’s Dogri morphology study documents oblique inflection of proper names. Its Ram-e =gi example asks for water to be given to Ram. The name’s additional material belongs to the target construction. It does not identify a different person or form part of the permanent spelling of the person’s name.
Spanish personal names do not acquire a comparable case ending merely because a precedes them. Consequently, retaining every name in an unchanged source form is not always the grammatical target choice. Preserve the person’s identity while allowing the Dogri construction to express their role through the form required in that environment.
The name’s ending affects the pattern
Sawhney distinguishes names ending in a consonant or u from names ending in ā or ī in the illustrated oblique pattern. The latter do not take the same added e. The study gives Rani=gi as the acceptable form in its example, rather than adding e to Rani. Thus recognizing a recipient is not sufficient reason to attach an identical ending to every name.
This is useful in a Spanish message listing several people who should receive something. Their roles may match while the target name forms differ. That difference does not imply that one recipient is more important or receives a different item. It follows the documented target morphology, which must be considered separately from the source message’s allocation of objects.
The actor can be marked differently as well
The Dogri study illustrates a giving sentence in which the actor has ne and the recipient has gi. For a Spanish source, this provides a useful reminder that subject identity cannot be transferred by word position alone. Recover who gives, who receives and what is given before rebuilding the target clause. The marked actor remains the giver rather than an additional recipient.
Sawhney also documents flexible ordering in the giving examples. Moving a participant later in the sentence does not automatically change their role. A Spanish-to-Dogri translation must preserve the transfer relationship while selecting the case-marked forms and order suited to the target. A correctly recognized personal name can still be attached to the wrong role if the source a is treated as a universal recipient marker. The practical goal is continuity of identity together with an accurate account of what each person does or receives.
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