This translation involves the use of the antipassive. You probably know what a passive voice is. But have you heard of the antipassive?
A passive essentially takes an object of a clause and makes it a subject, for a variety of reasons, including moving the focus, eliminating the need to explicitly state what would be the subject of the active voice version of the clause. So “Namí ate the apricot” would become “The apricot was eaten (by Namí)”
The antipassive essentially does the opposite. It takes a transitive verbal phrase and makes the *object* either disappear or demotes it to an oblique role. So what is necessarily a transitive verb otherwise, like “scare”, becomes intransitive. So it’s a little like saying “Namí has been scaring”. Only in English, that’s not really a good clause, so I translate it as “Namí has been scaring people”. With this indeterminate word, “people”, it doesn’t really matter WHO Namí has been scaring, it’s anyone and everyone who goes down by the river, potentially. The point is Namí and the fact that she’s acting weird.
Languages that have an ergative-absolutive verbal alignment are particular likely to use antipassives. This is because, in this type of alignment, the agent of a transitive and the subject of an intransitive are treated differently (the latter is treated syntactically like the patient of a transitive). Thus, the agent (ergative) gets promoted to absolutive and thus the former patient is demoted and less emphasized. The opposite is true for passive voices—they tend to be common in nominative accusative languages.
Rílin actually uses a split ergative system! So it gets both. :P