Mexican Spanish to Arabic: ustedes addresses the listeners
Third-person verb forms can address the people reading
Mexican Spanish Ustedes pueden entrar addresses the people who may enter. Although pueden has third-person plural morphology, ustedes identifies the listeners rather than an absent group. Translating this as “they may enter” would change the permission’s recipients. The distinction becomes especially important in group messages, classroom instructions and invitations addressed directly to several people.
El Colegio de México’s dictionary explicitly identifies ustedes as second-person plural while noting its combination with third-person plural verb forms. Arabic should preserve the address relationship, not import the grammatical person suggested by the Spanish verb in isolation. The independent pronoun, an opening salutation or the previous turn can determine whose action the verb describes.
One Spanish form can cover different Arabic choices
The University of Mosul’s comparison of Arabic and English nominal groups distinguishes antumā for two addressees, antum for masculine plural address and antunna for feminine plural address. These Standard Arabic distinctions are not all visible in Spanish ustedes. A translation may therefore need information about the actual group that the Spanish pronoun leaves unstated.
Compare Ustedes dos pueden entrar with Ustedes tres pueden entrar. Both contain ustedes and the same verb form, but the first explicitly limits the addressed group to two people. Replacing that detail with an undifferentiated plural would lose information that can affect the Arabic construction. Conversely, a bare ustedes provides no basis for inventing the number two.
Ustedes, Ana y Marta addresses two named people, while Ustedes, las tres hermanas addresses three. Here the Spanish message supplies both the people involved and the group’s size. The relevant target distinction should follow those details. The Spanish pronoun itself does not become feminine, and a translator should not wait for a nonexistent feminine spelling of ustedes before recognizing the reference.
A quoted instruction has its own addressees
In La maestra dijo: «Ustedes pueden entrar», the people addressed inside the quotation are the teacher’s listeners. They are not automatically the readers of the surrounding report. Changing the quotation into indirect speech without adjusting the reference could accidentally address the current audience or describe the teacher herself.
Similarly, Ellos dijeron que ustedes pueden entrar separates the people giving permission from those receiving it. Both groups can be associated with third-person plural verb forms in the Spanish sentence, but they play different conversational roles. Arabic person marking needs to retain that division rather than flatten both groups into “they”.
These observations concern Standard Arabic grammatical choices, not a claim that every spoken Arabic variety uses the same pronoun inventory. For a Mexican Spanish message, the first task is to identify the addressees accurately. Only then can the target variety’s number and gender distinctions be applied to those people without changing the social direction of the message.
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