Welsh to Galician: preserve owner identity when possessive forms merge
A Welsh owner distinction can become ambiguous in Galician
The official Welsh Foundation guide distinguishes ei as his, ei as her and eu as their through different mutation patterns and supporting pronouns. Its table gives ei lyfr e for a male owner and eu henw nhw for several owners. These are grammatical clues to reference, not simply alternative spellings of one possessive.
The Xunta’s Galician teaching resource explains that third-person singular and plural possessive forms coincide. It explicitly asks whether o seu libro belongs to him, her, them or a formally addressed recipient. The target phrase can therefore leave distinctions less explicit than the Welsh source did.
For Welsh-to-Galician translation, identify the intended owner before choosing the final wording. A source referring to one man should not become a claim about a group simply because seu permits several readings. Conversely, a plural owner should remain recoverable even if only one object is owned.
Feminine agreement does not identify a female owner
The Galician resource states that possessives agree with the possessed noun in gender and number, not with the possessor. Súa therefore cannot be treated as a permanent equivalent of Welsh ei meaning her. Its feminine shape belongs to the target noun phrase.
Welsh works differently in the cited possessive table: the mutation after ei distinguishes male from female reference. A translation must interpret that source distinction before rebuilding the Galician phrase. Copying the apparent gender label across the two systems would attach it to the wrong participant.
If the Welsh passage contains two possible owners, the Galician resource offers de plus a personal pronoun to clarify reference, illustrating o libro dela. That is a way to preserve the intended relationship, not a reason to repeat every owner unnecessarily. Use the complete phrase to retain a distinction that the source actually supplies.
An article and a plural ending answer different questions
The Welsh source’s ein refers to our, while the official guide separately notes an initial h before vowels. That source pattern identifies the speaker’s group; it does not by itself establish how many objects the group owns. Owner number and possession number must be interpreted independently.
Galician normally places a possessive before the noun together with an article, subject to documented exceptions. The plural forms of the possessed phrase express the number of things or people being identified. Adding the target article does not introduce another owner, and changing a target noun to plural does not necessarily enlarge the owner group.
When translating a Welsh family or contact-information description, keep these questions separate: which person or group the relationship belongs to, what noun is being identified, and how many referents that noun has. Galician’s shared third-person forms can hide a source distinction unless the surrounding wording preserves it. Agreement alone is not a substitute for resolving the Welsh reference.
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