English Translation
Marco bought his son a car.
“Mark bought his own son a car” would be a more accurate translation - or not?
In English it’s not idiomatic to say “own son”. It’s implied by “his son”.
If you click the source link to get to tatoeba, and then click the (i) by the English translation, to go to its page, you can see that there are two Russian translations of it. This one, and another without the своему.
ChatGPT says:
Both sentences are grammatically correct in Russian, but the first one sounds more natural and commonly used:
The second sentence, “Марко купил сыну машину.”, is grammatically correct but slightly less common. It still conveys the same meaning, but it might sound a bit abrupt without the possessive pronoun “своему.” However, context could make this version perfectly acceptable, especially in spoken language or informal writing.
Not a linguist, but here I would slightly disagree with ChatGPT. One thing worth mentioning is that heavy usage of “свой” came to Russian due to the influx of too literate translations from English, where it is used just in place of all the his/her/my/your/our/their that are very common in English and not so common in Russian. The redundant use of “свой” is strongly criticized among writers, especially in such obvious cases as “помахал своей рукой”, “почесал свой нос”, etc. Here, with “his son” it’s not that obviously redundant and may depend on the context. If no other sons are anyhow mentioned in the discussion, that “свой” can look out of place, otherwise it’s fine. In the spoken language, of course, the rules are way more lax, and hardly anyone would care.
As for the English translation, “his own son” would correspond to “свой собственный сын”, which makes hu-u-u-uge emphasis on “own” and as far as I can think right now, can be used only in a very emotional context. Something like “Он не мог и представить, что получит такой удар в спину от своего собственного сына”.
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My friend, a native Russian speaker, agrees that ChatGPT is exactly wrong on this point. “Марко купил сыну машину” is more common, not less common. It’s quite possible that ChatGPT doesn’t know how to compare statistics in such a case as this, but doesn’t know that it doesn’t know. What you say about the influence of poor English translations is quite plausible.
Thanks for providing the word “собственный”, which I was trying to remember. I agree that that’s the way one would emphasize that the son to whom Marco gave a car was his own, if that was necessary.