Spanish to Urdu: keep permission separate from causing or commissioning an action
A Spanish object pronoun does not identify who caused the event
Spanish hacer and dejar can place one person in charge of another person’s action, but they do not mean the same thing. FundéuRAE distinguishes the relevant causative and permissive uses: making an event occur differs from allowing it. In La dejé entrar, the speaker permits another person to enter. A translation saying that the speaker forced the entry would alter the relationship even if it retained both people.
The same explanation connects Spanish object-pronoun choice with the following verb’s transitivity. An intransitive infinitive commonly accompanies a direct-object pronoun for the permitted or compelled person; a transitive infinitive commonly leads to an indirect-object pronoun because another object is already present. Thus, Spanish la versus le cannot alone tell the Urdu translator whether the person received an object, received permission, or performed an action. Identify the meaning of hacer or dejar and the participants of the following predicate together.
Urdu permission uses a predicate built with “give”
Miriam Butt’s study of complex predication gives nadya=ne bAcce=ko kıtab pArh-ne d-i for Nadya permitting a child to read a book. The final verb has a lexical connection with giving, but this construction does not describe handing over the book. The permitted event is reading, and the child is the reader. A Spanish dejar-plus-infinitive statement therefore needs the Urdu permissive construction, not a literal translation of leaving or abandoning something.
Butt also distinguishes allowing someone to act from allowing an event to happen, illustrating the latter with trees being cut. The difference depends on the embedded event and whether a performer is explicitly represented. In translating Spanish permission about work on a property, preserve whether the source authorizes a named worker or merely permits a result. Do not add a human performer to every Urdu permissive, and do not remove one who is explicitly present in the Spanish account.
Commissioned work can contain more than one layer of agency
Butt’s separate workshop study, Layers of Predication, examines an Urdu example in which Tara permits Amu to have a child clean an elephant. It combines a causative form with a light verb and the permissive. The point for Spanish translation is the separation of roles: the person granting permission, the person arranging the work, and the person carrying it out need not be identical. Reducing the predicate to a simple “cleaned” would erase two of those relationships.
The workshop contrasts acceptable combinations with rejected permutations of the same verbal building blocks. These are structured predicates, not freely reorderable equivalents of Spanish verbs. In an instruction or a report about subcontracted work, first trace who authorized, who arranged, and who performed the action; then retain only the roles actually stated in the source. Urdu causative morphology and the permissive can express distinct layers together, while a Spanish wording may distribute those layers across several verbs. Neither the number nor the sequence of Spanish verbs provides a reliable target-word assembly rule.
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