Why English to Ukrainian is harder than it looks
Names change ending depending on the sentence. Writing to Oksana, you address her as Оксано and give something to Оксані. English leaves names alone and uses prepositions instead, so one short English line carries grammar Ukrainian has to spell out.
Past-tense verbs show who is speaking. “I went” is пішов from a man and пішла from a woman. Nothing in the English says which, which makes it the first thing to check in the preview on a personal message.
Ти or ви sets the register for the whole conversation. Ukrainian decides immediately how close you are to the reader. Ви to a friend reads distant; ти to someone senior or older can read as careless. Set the tone before translating rather than leaving it to a guess.
English needs “a” and “the”; Ukrainian throws them away. Going into Ukrainian this is easy, since the articles simply disappear. It matters in the other direction, and it is worth knowing that a Ukrainian reply translated back to English may have articles that were never in the original.
Written by Hardik Vegad, Co-founder, Translatify. Last updated .
Translatify