Mexican Spanish to Hungarian: separate the owner from the owned thing
Su and sus do not count the owners
The Diccionario del español de México lists su before a noun, with examples such as su lápiz and sus animales. The contrast marks the singular or plural possessed noun; sus does not independently tell you that several people own the animals. When translating a Mexican message into Hungarian, reading that final Spanish s as a count of owners can therefore change who the message concerns. Identify the owner separately from the thing or things being discussed. A list containing several possessions can still belong to one person, and a single possession can belong to a group.
Resolve reference before choosing Hungarian person
The RAE’s grammar glossary makes the ambiguity explicit: sus amigos can refer to the friends of a male or female individual, several people, or the person or people addressed politely. Consequently, a Mexican customer-service message and a third-person narrative can use the same Spanish possessive while referring to different participants. The sentence’s addressee and earlier noun phrases matter more than a dictionary choice between English his and her. Translating through either English word too early would introduce a gender interpretation that the Spanish form itself does not supply.
Possessives also express relations beyond legal ownership. The same glossary explains that su traducción can identify the person who produced a translation. For Hungarian output, first determine whether the writer means the recipient’s document, a translation authored by someone already mentioned, or a text belonging to an organization. These are distinct possible referents, even when the Spanish words remain unchanged. Replacing the expression with an explicit name in the source can clarify that relationship before translation.
Hungarian puts the relationship inside the noun
The Hungarian Academy’s language advisory explains that possessive person marking attaches to the possessed item. Its example a kapu kulcsa means the gate’s key: the relationship is marked on the key noun, unlike a separate Spanish su before the noun. The advisory also distinguishes the suffix -é on an owner from person marking on an owned item. Similar-looking endings need not have the same grammatical job; an output word cannot be judged by matching one Hungarian suffix to one Spanish possessive word.
A separate Hungarian possessed-plural marker distinguishes multiple owned things. The advisory gives ház-ai-m, my houses, and hajó-i-m, my boats, showing plural marking together with the owner’s person. Thus Mexican sus requires two decisions before Hungarian morphology is evaluated: how many items there are, and whose items they are. A translation that preserves a plural noun but changes the owner’s person is still incorrect. Conversely, a single Hungarian word may legitimately encode information expressed by both a Spanish possessive and its following noun; the missing separate word is not an omission.
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