Mexican Spanish to German: distinguish chatting with someone from telling them something
Platicar has more than one grammatical pattern
The Diccionario del español de México distinguishes intransitive platicar, where people converse, from a popular transitive use meaning to recount or tell something. Its example platicar con los amigos identifies the other conversational participants. A story that someone recounts has a different role: it is the content communicated. A German translation must determine which pattern the Mexican source uses before choosing a target verb.
This distinction is useful in invitations and personal updates. A request to spend time talking with a friend does not necessarily promise to narrate a particular incident. Conversely, a message asking what else someone wants to be told concerns content, not merely social conversation. Do not interpret a Spanish person pronoun as a topic or a story as a fellow speaker. The Mexican verb can cover these uses, but a single German replacement with unchanged complements will not automatically preserve both.
The German conversation construction marks participant and topic differently
The Leibniz Institute’s E-VALBU entry gives the pattern jemand unterhält sich mit jemandem über etwas. The other participant appears with mit and dative case; the topic appears with über and accusative case. Its short example Ich habe mich schon oft mit ihm darüber unterhalten separates the person spoken with from the matter discussed. This is a useful construction for the conversational sense of Mexican platicar, rather than a word-for-word copy of con and de.
The entry also explains that a reciprocal conversation can have a plural or coordinated subject, with the separate partner complement omitted; miteinander can make the reciprocity explicit. A Mexican Spanish statement about two people talking together therefore need not name one as the sole speaker and the other as a recipient. Preserve whether the source describes mutual conversation or one person recounting information to another. A German clause about the topic can also require darüber before a following subordinate clause, so the source’s content must be fitted into the target verb’s construction.
Leaving out the reflexive changes more than style
Duden identifies the conversational use specifically as sich unterhalten. The same entry separately lists maintaining something, providing someone’s livelihood, and entertaining people among other meanings of unterhalten. Its example Straßen, Gebäude unterhalten concerns maintaining roads or buildings. Removing the reflexive from a translation of a friendly Mexican conversation can therefore produce a different lexical reading, not merely a shorter version of the same sentence.
Duden also distinguishes enjoying oneself from having a conversation, although the forms can overlap. A Mexican source saying that people platicaron should not automatically become a claim that they had a wonderful time. Equally, a narrator telling an amusing story may entertain listeners, but platicar by itself does not assert that effect. Select the German predicate according to the source event: mutual exchange, reported content, or an explicitly stated entertainment effect. Then retain the reflexive and complement pattern that belongs to that selected meaning, rather than transferring the Mexican verb’s broad range to every occurrence of unterhalten.
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