Welsh to French: communication roles, polite address and object agreement
Translate the Welsh verb–preposition combination as a unit
The official South Wales Foundation guide explains that Welsh wrth does not always correspond to by. Its dweud wrth examples mean telling somebody, not being told by that person. A literal preposition substitution can therefore reverse the relationship between speaker and recipient.
The same guide distinguishes writing to a person with at from talking about somebody with am. These are not merely interchangeable ways to put a person after a verb. Before translating into French, establish whether the person communicates, receives the communication or is its topic.
A French sentence may use a different arrangement of verb and complement to express that relationship. Preserve the participant roles rather than the most familiar dictionary gloss of the Welsh preposition. A message correctly naming both people can still be wrong if it makes the listener into the source of the information.
Welsh chi can require a singular French interpretation
The Welsh guide uses chi in its conjugation tables, while the Open University’s beginner course presents singular-person questions with supporting pronouns in phrases such as ei henw hi. The complete context identifies whether one person or several people are being discussed or addressed; a pronoun should not be interpreted in isolation from that reference.
French vous can address one person politely as well as several people. The Académie française illustrates a woman addressed as Madame in Madame, je vous ai comprise. The feminine singular ending agrees with the preceding direct object vous referring to that woman.
For a Welsh message addressed respectfully to one woman, do not introduce a group merely because the French translation uses vous. The person count and the chosen form of address are separate decisions. Where French agreement refers to the individual, it must remain consistent with that actual reference.
The person understood is different from the person doing the understanding
The Académie’s example uses avoir, yet the participle agrees with the preceding direct object. Its explanation identifies the woman being understood as the agreement controller. The writer’s gender is not what chooses comprise in that particular construction.
Welsh initial changes can likewise carry information that belongs to a particular grammatical relationship. The Open University contrasts his name and her name through ei enw e and ei henw hi. Those source clues identify an owner; they do not automatically identify the grammatical controller of every French participle elsewhere in the sentence.
This direction therefore requires keeping several references distinct: the person speaking, the addressee, the topic of the communication and the owner of anything mentioned. A Welsh phrase can identify one of them without specifying all the others. Build the French clause from those resolved roles, then apply its agreement rules. Copying a gender clue from the nearest Welsh word into every French ending would preserve neither the source relationship nor the target grammar.
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