Welsh to Canadian French: we, conversational on and conditional commitments
Welsh ni identifies a group, not an unspecified somebody
The official South Wales Foundation grammar uses ni for we in its person paradigms, including Basen ni’n talu, we would pay. A translation of that source refers to a group containing the speaker. It should not drift into an impersonal statement about what people generally do.
Quebec’s Office québécois de la langue française explains that French on can refer either to unidentified people or to definite participants represented by personal pronouns such as nous. These uses have different reference. The same written pronoun does not make them interchangeable.
For Welsh-to-Canadian-French translation, establish whether the source group is the speaker’s actual group. If on is chosen in a conversational rendering, maintain that reference throughout the passage. Introducing an unrelated generic on nearby can make it unclear whether the same people still perform the next action.
Agreement can reveal information not supplied by the Welsh group pronoun
OQLF gives On a été consultés for a known masculine group and On a été rassemblées for a known feminine group. Although the verb remains in the on construction, relevant participles or adjectives can agree with the people represented. Grammatical singular form and the actual group reference must be distinguished.
The Welsh Foundation guide’s ni forms do not separately identify male and female groups in their listed paradigm. A target agreement decision therefore cannot be recovered from the pronoun alone. Use the actual participant context rather than treating a Welsh first-person plural form as a gender specification.
This matters in an account of a meeting or consultation. If the Welsh source identifies a group elsewhere, the French agreement must remain consistent with it. If it leaves the group’s composition unspecified, a translation should not invent additional participants merely to explain a target ending. Participant reference and grammatical agreement are related decisions, not identical pieces of source information.
Keep the conditional and the level of formality
Basen ni’n talu is conditional in the Welsh guide, distinct from the future payment forms in its concise-future section. Choosing French on or nous does not settle that event distinction. A hypothetical group payment must not become an assertion that the group will certainly pay.
OQLF also distinguishes conversational uses of on for known participants from more formal writing, where the corresponding personal pronoun, usually nous, is preferred. That is guidance about register; it does not mean conversational on is inherently inaccurate.
For a Welsh group message, decide independently who acts, whether the action is hypothetical, and how formal the target communication should sound. A casual Canadian French exchange and a formal written commitment can express the same participant group through different wording. Preserve the source’s degree of commitment while selecting the register, rather than allowing a pronoun substitution to transform a possibility into a promise or a known group into anonymous people.
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