Breakdown of Czy wiesz, przez kogo został przetłumaczony ten tekst?
czy
[question particle]
ten
this (m)
kto
who
wiedzieć
to know
tekst
the text
przetłumaczyć
to translate (perfective)
zostać
to be (passive auxiliary)
przez
by (agent of a passive verb)
Questions & Answers about Czy wiesz, przez kogo został przetłumaczony ten tekst?
Why is 'by whom' translated as przez kogo? Don't we usually use the Instrumental case to say how something was done?
In Polish, when you use the passive voice, the person or thing actually doing the action (the agent) is expressed with przez followed by the Accusative case. The Accusative form of kto (who) is kogo. We only use the Instrumental case on its own for the tool used to do an action, like writing with a pen.
Why does the sentence use został instead of był for 'was'?
In Polish passive voice, you choose the helper verb based on the aspect of the main verb. został is the past tense of zostać (to become), which is used with perfective (completed) verbs like przetłumaczyć (to translate completely). If the action was imperfective, meaning ongoing or repeated, you would use był with the imperfective verb tłumaczyć instead.
Since ten tekst is the thing being acted upon, why isn't it in the Accusative case?
Because this is a passive sentence. In an active sentence like 'Someone translated this text', the text is the direct object and takes the Accusative case. But in a passive sentence, that object becomes the grammatical subject, which means it must be in the Nominative case. Keep in mind that for masculine inanimate nouns like tekst, the Nominative and Accusative forms look exactly the same anyway!
Could I change the word order to Czy wiesz, przez kogo ten tekst został przetłumaczony?
Yes, absolutely. Polish word order is very flexible. Putting ten tekst at the very end of the sentence is just a stylistic choice that places slightly more emphasis on 'this text' as the final piece of new information, but your version is perfectly correct and sounds very natural.
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