Tibetan to Urdu: a go word can build a passive rather than describe a journey
The target verb has more than one construction
The Urdu documentation identifies جا, jā, both as a lexical go verb and as an auxiliary in passive constructions with a perfective participle. A Tibetan source clause should therefore be interpreted for voice before the target word is assigned a motion meaning. The presence of jā in Urdu does not itself mean that a participant physically travels.
A Tibetan statement about an item being moved or repaired may require a passive report rather than a journey by the item’s owner. Conversely, a source account of somebody going somewhere should not become a passive merely because the same target stem participates in both. The complete Urdu verb sequence determines the interpretation.
An ongoing action needs its aspect construction
The documentation describes رہ, rah, in progressive constructions together with the main verb stem and a form of be. A Tibetan report of ongoing activity needs that event viewpoint preserved separately from the narrator’s knowledge of it. Seeing an activity and presenting it as in progress are related facts, but they are not identical grammatical choices.
Zeisler’s Standard Spoken Tibetan discussion includes experiential perspectives alongside other epistemic categories. An observed completed event should not become an ongoing Urdu activity merely because observation is salient in the source. Similarly, an ongoing activity reported from another person’s information should retain its progression without acquiring an invented firsthand claim.
Present and past be forms locate the description
The Urdu documentation contrasts ہے, hai, with تھا, thā, as present and past forms used in copular and periphrastic constructions. A Tibetan description of what was true earlier should therefore not be translated as a current state merely because the target lexical predicate has been identified correctly.
This becomes important in an account where an activity was underway when somebody arrived but is no longer continuing. The Urdu progressive construction and its temporal auxiliary need to work together. Choosing a progressive component alone does not say whether the source describes now or an earlier reference point, and a past auxiliary alone does not establish whether the activity was completed.
Ability and successful accomplishment are different claims
The documentation distinguishes سک, sak, for ability from پا, pā, associated with managing to do something. A Tibetan statement that an action was possible differs from reporting that somebody succeeded in carrying it out. Those meanings should not be collapsed into one generic modal translation.
For a Tibetan repair report, establish whether the worker could perform the repair, actually managed it, was still performing it or whether the item was repaired. These are different combinations of ability, accomplishment, aspect and voice. The Urdu target can express them through different constructions even when the same item and worker recur. Preserve the source event configuration before selecting familiar auxiliary stems, so that a grammatically plausible sequence does not turn a possibility into a completed result or a passive report into a trip.
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