Spanish to Upper Sorbian: translate the relationship behind que
Identify the role inside the Spanish relative clause
Spanish que can connect a noun to a clause without changing its visible form for gender or number. Other relative expressions expose more structure: the academy gives el lápiz con el que escribo, where the pencil is an instrument used for writing. For an Upper Sorbian translation, establish that relationship rather than treating every que as the same linking word. The participant described by the preceding noun may be the doer, the affected object, a recipient, or an accompanying person.
The academy also distinguishes a relative clause modifying an explicitly named noun from a construction whose human antecedent is incorporated into the relative expression itself. That affects what information the target clause must recover. An isolated Spanish relative phrase may leave the noun implicit, while a longer passage supplies it earlier. Before judging an Upper Sorbian form by its resemblance to a Spanish relative pronoun, determine the antecedent, the relationship expressed inside the subordinate clause, and whether the source has actually named the participant.
An invariant Upper Sorbian relative does not fit every relationship
Pankau’s Upper Sorbian study contrasts inflected relative pronouns with invariant kiž. In the data he analyzes, kiž works for subject and direct-object relatives but not for the recipient or accompaniment relationships illustrated in his tests. For the latter, he gives forms including komuž and z kimž. A Spanish clause with a preposition cannot therefore be converted reliably by dropping that preposition and inserting kiž everywhere. The target needs a construction that expresses the same grammatical relationship.
The study also shows ž attached to the relevant relative forms, distinguishing them from otherwise similar interrogative forms. This is useful when translating a Spanish clause describing someone rather than an embedded question asking who did something. Pankau expressly acknowledges that some grammatical descriptions permit wider kiž constructions with a resumptive pronoun, while his main informant rejected them. His restriction is evidence about the analyzed usage, not a reason to declare every alternative found in Upper Sorbian writing impossible. The practical requirement is a supported construction for the intended variety.
A repeated target pronoun may reflect a different construction
Stone’s description explicitly discusses nonstandard Upper Sorbian relatives that combine kiž with an anaphoric pronoun. One attested example is muž, kiž jeho znaju, whose literal organization includes both the relative marker and him. For Spanish-to-Upper-Sorbian work, this explains why a target pronoun can appear even when the Spanish relative construction leaves the corresponding position unspoken. Such a pronoun should not be removed merely because it appears twice to a word-by-word comparison.
At the same time, Stone separates those colloquial patterns from the literary account and treats Upper and Lower Sorbian separately. His Lower Sorbian discussion of ak(o) is not a replacement list for Upper Sorbian. In a Spanish passage containing several relative clauses, the useful consistency is preservation of each antecedent and relationship, not selection of one universal relativizer. Decide whether the requested result follows standard written Upper Sorbian or represents dialogue, and evaluate any resumptive construction within that scope. Published variation deserves an explicit choice, rather than an automatic repair based on Spanish surface form.
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