Mexican Spanish to Sorani Kurdish: mis jefes may mean my parents
Authority at work is not the only meaning of jefe
Mexican Spanish jefe and jefa can mean a boss, but the Diccionario del español de México also records their popular use for father and mother. Mis jefes can therefore refer to the speaker’s parents. A Sorani translation that always selects an employment relationship could place a family conversation in an office that the source never mentioned.
Compare Mi jefa llega mañana in a conversation about a family visit with the same sentence in a conversation about a supervisor’s inspection. The arrival is the same event; the relationship is different. A target noun for mother or for a workplace superior should follow the established referent, rather than the assumption that jefa invariably names a manager.
The Spanish plural does not count the possessors
In mis jefes, mis belongs to a single speaker even though jefes is plural. In nuestro jefe, the speaker includes other people in the relationship while jefe is singular. These are two separate number decisions: how many people possess or share the relationship, and how many relatives or authorities are being discussed.
W. M. Thackston’s Sorani reference grammar illustrates possessive enclitics with kúřim and kúřmân, contrasting my son with our son. The difference concerns the possessor. This helps explain why the plural ending in Spanish mis cannot itself justify selecting a Sorani first-person plural possessive.
The distinction matters in a family account: Mis jefes nos ayudaron identifies the speaker’s parents, while Nuestros padres nos ayudaron presents parents in a relationship shared by a group. Those groups might overlap in a particular household, but the translator should not decide that they must. The explicit first-person singular or plural relationship belongs in the target.
Actual relatives and friendly forms of address require separate choices
Thackston also describes special possessive behavior with family nouns, including father, mother, brother and sister. His distinction between birâm for an actual brother and birâkám for a nonliteral or address use shows why ordinary possessive examples cannot be applied indiscriminately to kinship. A Mexican colloquial parent reference can still identify a real parent.
There is another Mexican use to keep apart: the dictionary records jefe or jefa as a courteous way of addressing a stranger. A customer called jefa by a worker is not thereby being identified as that worker’s mother or employer. Translating this address with a literal family relationship would add an intimacy or biography absent from the exchange.
Thus the informal character of jefe does not settle the target expression by itself. A genuine mother, an actual supervisor and a politely addressed stranger can all be involved in ordinary Mexican conversation. Once the relationship is identified, Sorani possessive and address choices can express it without importing the other two meanings or turning one speaker’s relatives into everyone’s shared parents.
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