Mexican Spanish to Turkish: asking the time without asking to possess it
A polite time request is not an exchange of property
The Diccionario del español de México records ¿Me da su hora, por favor? as a way of asking the time. The verb of giving and possessive su do not require the listener to hand over an hour of their life. A Turkish rendering should preserve the information request rather than construct an unintended transaction.
Compare that source expression with a real possession question. Tokyo University of Foreign Studies gives Sorunuz var mı? as the answer for asking whether the addressed group has a question. Here the possession construction is appropriate because availability of a question is what is being checked. That teaching example is not a translation of the Mexican clock request: using its structure simply because the source contains su would overlook the difference in purpose.
A clock reading and a starting time are different answers
TUFS illustrates an information question with Parti saat kaçta başlıyor?, asking when a party starts. The requested answer is a scheduled time, not whether the listener possesses a party or knows one. Its question-word construction provides a useful contrast with the yes-or-no possession example above.
An original Mexican message can ask the current time, the hour a party starts or whether someone has time to attend. Those requests may all contain hora or tiempo, but they seek different information. A clock reading does not answer a question about availability, and the current time does not necessarily identify the party’s scheduled beginning. Choose the target construction after establishing which answer the source expects.
The TUFS pronunciation lesson explains that the illustrated question-word questions do not use the yes-or-no question element. This does not mean a Spanish question mark has one Turkish equivalent that should be inserted into every interrogative. The difference between asking whether a proposition is true and requesting a missing time or quantity belongs to the sentence itself.
Courtesy and lateness can also hide in the wording
The Mexican dictionary separately records ¡A buenas horas! as an expression for something happening too late to be useful. It need not congratulate anybody on choosing a good hour. If a delayed response prompts that remark, a target statement praising the timing would reverse the evaluation even if its clock vocabulary were impeccable.
Su in the polite clock request also deserves a participant check. The RAE explains that usted refers to the person being addressed although it takes third-person Spanish agreement and possessive forms. An original request to a stranger should therefore remain addressed to that stranger; it should not become a report about another person’s time.
For this pair, distinguish the request’s social form from the information it seeks. A courteous source can still ask a direct question about the clock. A possession question can concern actual availability, and a supposedly positive timing expression can criticise lateness. The attested Turkish examples reveal different grammatical choices for different questions; none licenses replacing every Mexican hour expression with the same structure.
Language references