German to Galician: a feminine possessive form can describe a spatial relation
A location phrase does not necessarily express ownership
German case-marked pronouns occur in prepositional relationships as well as in possession. A phrase meaning “in front of me” identifies the speaker as a spatial reference point. It does not say that the space or the person in front belongs to the speaker. The Galician translation can nevertheless contain a form that also belongs to the possessive paradigm.
The Xunta de Galicia teaching resource explicitly contrasts diante de min with diante miña. It explains that a location adverb followed by de and a personal pronoun can be expressed with the feminine singular possessive instead. Therefore miña in this construction should not be interpreted as proof that the German speaker is female or that an omitted feminine object is being owned. The complete spatial expression supplies its function.
The person used as a landmark must stay the same
Compare the source meanings “The visitor was in front of me” and “I was in front of the visitor.” Both name the same people, but exchange their spatial roles. A target possessive-looking form must continue to identify the correct landmark. Its feminine grammatical form is not a licence to substitute another female participant or turn the landmark into the moving subject.
German pronoun case helps separate the subject from a prepositional complement, but the corresponding Galician construction need not reproduce the same sequence of separate words. A German reader should therefore interpret the target adverb together with the personal form rather than judge miña as an isolated translation of a German possessive. In this environment, the translation is expressing where someone was relative to the speaker.
Ordinary possession still has its own agreement and reference
The same Galician resource explains that a possessive agrees in gender and number with the possessed noun, not with the possessor. It also notes that third-person seu forms can leave the owner’s identity ambiguous and recommends de plus a personal pronoun when clarification is needed. These are separate facts from the feminine form used after location adverbs. A translation should not merge their functions because both draw from possessive vocabulary.
Consider a German message meaning “Her bicycle was in front of me.” The source identifies a woman associated with the bicycle and the speaker as a spatial landmark. They are not necessarily the same person. A Galician rendering has to preserve those two references even if both parts of the sentence contain possessive-related material. Changing the bicycle owner to the speaker merely because the location phrase refers to “me” would alter the report. Conversely, reading every feminine target form as a female owner could invent another woman. Distinguish who owns or is associated with the object, which object the noun phrase identifies, and who anchors the spatial relation. Those three decisions explain the target construction more reliably than aligning each Galician possessive-looking word with a German ownership expression.
Language references