Spanish to Armenian: whose book is su libro?
Resolve the owner separately from the thing owned
Spanish sus amigos can refer to the friends of one person or several people, including a politely addressed listener or listeners. The academy explicitly lists these possible readings. The plural ending does not count the owners. For Armenian translation, determine whose friends the passage means before selecting a possessive expression: a target reference to several owners can add information the Spanish phrase never supplied.
Spanish possessives also express relationships broader than legal ownership. In su traducción, the academy notes that the possessive can identify the person who produced the translation. Thus a message about reviewing someone’s translation need not mean reviewing a document they merely possess. Armenian wording must preserve the relevant relation between the person and the noun. Keep authorship, possession, and a personal relationship distinct when resolving the reference. A change from a possessive before the Spanish noun to one after it does not by itself turn an author into an owner or determine which previously mentioned person is intended.
Eastern Armenian can distinguish the subject’s own possession
Dum-Tragut’s Modern Eastern Armenian grammar contrasts nra girk’-ĕ with ir girk’-ĕ in examples where Aram takes a book. In the first, the book belongs to another person; in the second, it is Aram’s own. The grammar describes the reflexive possessive as required when the third-person possessive refers back to the sentence’s subject. This is information that an isolated Spanish su libro may leave unresolved.
For a Spanish narrative, identify the actor and the possessor before approving either Armenian choice. A sentence in which a person collects somebody else’s book should not silently become a statement about collecting their own. Conversely, assuming that every possessive must identify a different person can create an unintended new owner. The grammar’s third-person possessive nra covers his, her, and its; it does not reproduce those English gender divisions. The useful target contrast here concerns the relation to the subject, while the owner’s identity remains recoverable from the discourse. These examples and rules concern Modern Eastern Armenian rather than a claim covering every Armenian variety.
Possessor features and noun features remain separate
The Armenian treebank documentation records person on personal possessive determiners as the person of the possessor. It separately uses layered possessor features with nouns and certain other forms, distinguishing them from properties of the modified noun. For Spanish-to-Armenian work, this offers a precise way to interpret a compact target expression: information about the speaker, the addressee, or a third party is not the same as the number of objects possessed.
That documentation also identifies reflexive possessive determiners and does not use grammatical gender as an Armenian feature. Consequently, an Armenian possessive phrase need not display a separate ending corresponding to the Spanish noun’s masculine or feminine agreement. This does not license erasing a lexically specified person, such as a named mother or father. Nor does gender neutrality decide whether a book is the actor’s own. Read the Armenian result along two independent lines: which participant is linked to the noun, and what the noun phrase says about the entity itself. The Spanish source can leave one of those questions implicit while explicitly answering the other.
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