Tibetan to Georgian: reported speech needs to retain its original voice
The target has an explicit reported-speech distinction
The Georgian documentation distinguishes the indirect-speech marker -ო from -მეთქი, glossed as referring to what somebody else said and what I said. A Tibetan quotation must therefore be read for whose utterance is being reported before the Georgian construction is selected. The narrator and the quoted speaker are not automatically the same person.
Zeisler describes Tibetan quotation markers in relation to the perspective of an original speaker. Translating such a report involves both preserving that attribution and choosing target wording for the proposition itself. A source narrator who quotes another person should not become the author of that quoted claim through an inappropriate Georgian speech marker.
A speech suffix can attach to a noun as well as a verb
The Georgian documentation illustrates სახლიო, a house as somebody said, and წერსო, he writes as somebody said. Reported status is not limited to a separate introductory verb meaning say. A Tibetan source report may therefore require the target speech relation to be recognised even where its visible marker is attached to another word.
This matters when a Tibetan passage contains a quoted label rather than a complete narrative sentence. The Georgian form must preserve whether the narrator endorses the label directly or is reporting somebody else’s description. Dropping attribution can turn a tentative or attributed identification into an unqualified statement by the narrator.
Not being able is different from simply not doing
The same Georgian documentation distinguishes არ, not, from ვერ, not able. A negative Tibetan report inside a quotation should therefore retain whether the original person denies an action or reports inability. Keeping the speech marker while changing the negative meaning would still misrepresent what was said.
A Tibetan traveller can report that another person did not write, or that they could not write. Those accounts have different implications about ability and circumstance. In Georgian, the negative selection must reflect the proposition being quoted, while the speech marker continues identifying whose statement it is. Attribution and negation require independent decisions.
A compact target form may contain a complete relation
The documentation also illustrates სახლია as house plus a copular element and სახლში as in the house. Similar-looking target word shapes consequently express different relations: identity, location or reported identity. A Tibetan phrase cannot be translated by choosing a Georgian house-related form without identifying the source construction.
In a report where somebody calls a building a house and later says that a person is inside it, preserve each claim separately. The Georgian version must distinguish what the building is called, where the person is and who supplied the information. This is especially important when the Tibetan account changes from the narrator’s observation to another speaker’s words within the same passage.
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