Welsh to Bosnian: inflected prepositions and the roles inside a message
A Welsh preposition can carry participant reference
The official South Wales Foundation grammar contrasts at Sam with ata i, ato fe and ati hi in examples about writing to somebody. The preposition changes with the person it introduces. Reading only a dictionary headword for at would overlook information already present in the inflected phrase.
Bosnian expresses participant relationships through its own noun and pronoun case constructions. The MULTEXT-East specifications distinguish nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative, locative and instrumental forms. A Welsh inflected preposition therefore cannot be translated by preserving its shape and appending an unchanged target noun.
For a message about correspondence, identify the writer separately from the recipient before building the Bosnian clause. A reference to her in ati hi identifies the person receiving the writing in the cited example. It does not identify the writer as female or make the recipient the owner of an object mentioned later.
Do not translate every Welsh am as about
The Welsh guideline explicitly warns that am does not always mean about. It contrasts combinations including gwybod am, knowing about, with chwilio am, looking for, and aros am, waiting for. The governing verb determines the relationship; a preposition’s most familiar English gloss is insufficient.
This is particularly relevant when the target distinguishes participants through case and construction. Somebody being discussed, somebody being sought and somebody being awaited are different relations. A Bosnian translation must express the one licensed by the complete Welsh expression, rather than retain an inappropriate about phrase throughout.
The target’s visible ending is evidence to interpret, not a guarantee of one role in every context. MULTEXT-East lists zemlji under both dative and locative analyses. Identical word forms can participate in different structures. Just as Welsh am needs its verb, a target case form needs its surrounding construction to establish the intended relationship.
An altered Welsh initial consonant is not a Bosnian case ending
The Welsh guide separately documents initial mutation after particular grammatical triggers. Its examples include questions and possessive constructions. Such changes affect the beginning of a Welsh word, whereas the Bosnian inflectional examples organize differences through the target word’s own paradigm.
For example, MULTEXT-East distinguishes žena as nominative from ženi in dative and locative entries. These are forms of the same noun, not different people. A Welsh source’s initial change cannot be copied into Bosnian as though both systems used the same signal for the same syntactic relationship.
This direction consequently needs a full reading of the Welsh verb and its following phrase before target inflection is selected. Establish whether a person acts, receives correspondence, is discussed or is being sought. Then construct the Bosnian phrase appropriate to that role. This preserves the practical content of a message even when person information and grammatical relationships move to different parts of the translated sentence.
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