Spanish to Ganda: unpack se lo before rebuilding the object markers
Spanish se can stand for a recipient rather than a reflexive
In a Spanish sequence such as se los compré, se can be the form that le or les takes before a third-person accusative pronoun. The academy explicitly distinguishes that construction from reflexive and reciprocal se. Before translating into Ganda, identify the people receiving or benefiting from the action and the items being referred to. A word-for-word reflexive interpretation can turn a purchase for another person into an action directed at oneself.
The distinction also affects number. Spanish se in this use does not visibly tell you whether its referent is one recipient or several, while los may identify several objects. Those are separate references. Do not infer multiple recipients merely because the following accusative pronoun is plural, or one object merely because se has an unchanging shape. Use the surrounding noun phrases to establish both sets of participants. The Ganda result will need the correct references even when the source has compressed them into short pronouns.
Ganda can put two object references on the verb
Ssekiryango’s primary Ganda study illustrates Maama a-zi-mu-wa-dde, meaning that mother has given it to him, with money as the understood transferred item and father as the understood recipient. The two object markers do different work within the verb. That compact form is not evidence that one of the two Spanish object references has been omitted. Conversely, attaching two markers without establishing their antecedents can preserve the number of references while exchanging their roles.
The study also distinguishes applicative and causative verb extensions. A form derived from doing or making can introduce a participant for whose benefit the action is performed; a causative can introduce somebody made to perform it. For Spanish input, making something for father and making father produce something are different events. The target suffix and its object references must express the intended relationship. A Spanish para phrase should not silently turn into a causee merely because both constructions involve an additional person beside the original actor and object.
Marker order follows roles, not Spanish pronoun order
Van der Wal’s comparative research describes the Ganda recipient marker as closest to the verb stem in the illustrated multiple-object patterns. The ordering is not obtained by copying the order of Spanish se and lo or los as a sequence of separate words. The study provides a further fieldwork example involving Judith lending an assistant to the speaker: the markers identify the borrowed person and the recipient, and the opposite interpretation is rejected.
This example is useful precisely because both relevant participants are human. Animacy alone cannot decide who is lent and who receives the loan, and selecting a first-person reference does not erase that distinction. For a Spanish sentence about lending a person’s assistance, keep the recipient separate from the person whose help is made available. Read the Ganda markers together with the verb’s semantic structure. The source’s clitic sequence and the target’s marker sequence can look different while preserving the same event; matching them by position can produce a grammatical-looking sentence with the wrong participants.
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