On Translating the Impersonal First-Person Plural

Abstract

This paper draws attention to the translation of a subset of impersonal constructions that has been called the reference impersonal. A Bible translator will encounter reference impersonals in the source text. In translation the target language may also require the use of impersonal constructions even when they are not present in the source text. The paper focuses on the reference impersonal first-person plural (1pl) in Magar Kham, a language spoken in mid-western Nepal, which tends to use the 1pl for a generic or referentially unspecified group of people. This impersonal 1pl often occurs in conjunction with the phrase mĩ-rə “man-pl.” Generally, the impersonal 1pl implies that the speaker identifies with the referent(s). The paper also demonstrates that though the reference impersonal 1pl and the personal 1pl both use the same pronoun and morphology per se, due to pragmatic constraints only the personal counterpart can occur in the singular.