Recognizing pronoun reference
German distinguishes between natural and grammatical gender: while
the natural gender of das Mädchen is female, the grammatical
gender is neuter. Personal and possessive pronouns reference grammatical
gender. In English this distinction is not made: (natural) masculine
gender is always he/his, female she/her and neuter
it/its.
So errors are inevitable, if personal and possesive pronouns are
translated without consideration of their context only according
to their form:er=he, sie=she, es=it, sein=his, ihr=her.
Das Mädchen ist traurig.
Es hat seine Tasche verloren. |
| Without context reference: |
The girl is sad. It
has lost his bag. |
[wrong] |
| With context reference: |
The girl is sad. She
has lost her bag. |
[correct] |
Normally personal and possessive pronouns are translated in Translate
pro with respect to their context. The program tries to reconstruct
pronoun references, even across sentence boundaries. Therefore it
can happen that a single sentence has different translations depending
on the sentences preceding it. |