English to Polish

Morphology

Nouns

Polish is a highly inflected language; verbs (and adjectives describing them) are declined according to gender, number, and case. Traditionally, Polish is considered to have 3 genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter), but the more modern view is that is contains 5: masculine person, masculine animate, masculine inanimate, feminine, and neuter.

Verbs

Polish has typically two forms for each verb, the perfective and the imperfective aspect. These usually come with a change in stem, for example:

Imperfective	Perfective	Gloss
widzieć	zobaczyć	to see
stawiać	postawić	to set up

The perfective denotes a completed action. According to Wikipedia, "The aspectual distinctions exist on the lexical level — there is no unique method to form a perfective verb from a given imperfective one."

The imperfective is used for the present tense ('Co robisz?': 'What are you doing?') and for negative commands ('Nie rób tego': 'don't (ever) do that', or to use Hiberno English 'don't be doing that'); the perfective for the simple future ('Czy zrobisz to?': 'Will you do it?') and for positive commands ('Zrób to szybciej': 'Do it faster')

Apertium notes

As this is lexicalised, there is only one way to deal with it, and that is in the dictionaries, each verb will have two entries in the bilingual dictionary, one for perfective and one for imperfective.

For example:

    <e><p><l>read<s n="vblex"/></l><r>czytać<s n="vblex"/><s n="imperf"/></r></p></e>
    <e><p><l>read<s n="vblex"/></l><r>przeczytać<s n="vblex"/><s n="perf"/></r></p></e>

Syntax

Articles

Polish doesn't have articles, so translating English→Polish, we'll need to remove them, translating Polish→English, we'll need to add them.

   Mam               zegar
   mieć+p1.sg.pres 
   have+I            clock+nom
`I have a clock'

Apertium notes

There aren't really any rules to this, so the fallback will be "if we can't tell for sure, leave them out".

Word order

Basic English and Polish word order are the same, SVO; however, as Polish morphology details the part of speech, Polish word order can vary to provide emphasis.

"Ja kocham Ciebie" = "I love you"

"Ciebie ja kocham" = "I love you"

Object dropping

In answering questions, it is common in Polish to omit the object ("Czy kupiłeś piwo? - Kupiłem": "Did you buy beer? - I bought"). However, as Polish speakers of English commonly drop the object in English, perhaps it's acceptable for us to do so too.