Mexican Spanish to French: extrañar a alguien reverses the manquer relationship
The person missed is not the person feeling the absence
Mexican Spanish Extraño a mis amigos makes the speaker the subject of extrañar and the friends its object. French Ses amis lui manquent, an example in the Académie française’s dictionary, places the absent friends in subject position and identifies the person feeling their absence through lui. Moving the Spanish words into the same grammatical slots would reverse who misses whom.
The Diccionario del español de México records extrañar as feeling the absence of a person or thing that is loved or familiar. That includes family and accustomed objects, not only romantic longing. A French translation should preserve the particular relationship stated, rather than make a sentimental confession more intimate simply because extrañar appears.
Small pronouns can reverse the message
Compare Te extraño with Me extrañas. The first says that the speaker misses the addressee; the second says that the addressee misses the speaker. The verb’s person and the object pronoun distinguish those meanings. In a French construction with manquer à quelqu’un, the subject corresponds to the missing person, so mechanically preserving the Spanish subject would produce the opposite emotional direction.
This also affects a report such as Ana extraña a Luis. Ana experiences the absence, while Luis is the person absent from her perspective. The French clause has to retain those roles even if its subject is Luis. A reader should not have to infer that the translation really meant the reverse of the relationship its grammar expresses.
Negation leaves the same role distinction intact. No te extraño denies the speaker’s feeling of absence; No me extrañas denies that feeling in the addressee. Moving no into the target without first assigning the people correctly could make a negative message about one person’s feelings into a claim about the other’s.
Me extraña can instead express surprise
The Mexican dictionary also records an extrañar construction for finding something surprising. Me extraña que no llame expresses surprise that the person does not call. It is not simply another version of extrañar a alguien. Translating it through the personal-absence pattern would confuse a reaction to an event with missing a person.
French manquer itself has several other constructions. The Académie distinguishes manquer de, expressing a lack, from a person manquer à someone, and also records transitive uses such as missing a train or an appointment. Recognizing the Spanish absence meaning does not authorize selecting any French construction containing the same verb.
In a message such as Extraño a Ana, pero me extraña que no escriba, the two occurrences deliberately express different experiences: missing Ana and being surprised by her silence. The translation should retain both, with the French personal-absence construction assigning the missing person and the experiencer correctly, and a separate expression for surprise. One repeated Spanish spelling does not require one repeated French grammatical pattern.
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