Spanish to Tongan: su asesinato can leave the person’s role unresolved
A Spanish possessive does not always identify ownership
Spanish su asesinato can refer to the murder in which the person was the victim, or to a killing associated with that person as its perpetrator, depending on the surrounding account. The possessive su alone does not label the participant as the killer or the person killed. A Tongan translation must not choose between those roles by treating the phrase as ordinary ownership.
Yuko Otsuka’s research illustrates a Tongan distinction with ʻene tamateʻi, his killing something, and hono tamateʻi, his being killed. In these illustrated verb-related constructions, the two possessive forms identify different participant roles. Selecting the wrong one could reverse the central relationship in the Spanish phrase.
Spanish can make either reading explicit
El asesinato que cometió identifies the person as committing the murder. El asesinato del que fue víctima identifies the person as its victim. These fuller Spanish descriptions show the alternatives that the short su asesinato may leave dependent on earlier sentences. They should not be collapsed into a single role merely because both can be shortened with the same possessive.
Consider a crime novel summary that first introduces a suspect and a victim. A later mention of su asesinato may rely on the reader’s knowledge of which person is being discussed and what happened to them. In Tongan, the relevant nominalised verb construction can require a more explicit grammatical commitment to the person’s role.
If the victim is wrongly made the killer, the translation does more than change the viewpoint of the sentence. It changes the event described by the plot. Likewise, a passage about someone committing a killing must not become an account of that person’s death. Matching a Spanish possessive with the same generic gloss “his” cannot protect against this reversal.
The distinction belongs to a particular construction
Otsuka discusses the possessive contrast when the forms precede a verb, in constructions comparable to a possessive plus an event expression. This is not a rule that every object described with one possessive class is an actor and every object with the other is a victim. Ordinary possessed nouns and verb-related expressions need to be analysed in their own constructions.
Spanish also has first-person and second-person event phrases such as mi detención or tu descripción. The same general question can arise: does the person perform an action, undergo it, or have another relationship to the event? The killing examples establish an important distinction, but they do not supply a ready-made Tongan translation for every Spanish event noun.
For su asesinato, use the surrounding narrative to establish who killed whom before choosing the target form. If the source remains unresolved, its ambiguity should not be silently converted into a definite accusation or a definite death of the wrong participant. The attested Tongan pair shows why translating the event and the possessive together is essential: the grammatical relationship can determine the meaning of the whole account.
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