How do I use "para" with an infinitive?
The sentence in English is
"We need volunteers to help cut the grass".
When I tried to make the statement publicly, I said
"Necesitamos voluntarios ayudar corte el césped".
Later, one attendee from a Latin American country corrected me by saying
"Necesitamos voluntarios para ayudar a cortar el césped", or adding "para" before the first infinitive and changing "corte" to the infinitive form and adding "a".
Is there a rule for the use of "para" before an infinitive in this case?
3 Answers
It's sort of the other way around. You need the "para" to explain/introduce the purpose for which you need volunteers. Then, since the purpose is "to help (to) cut the grass", "ayudar a cortar el césped". The "a" goes with "ayudar" ("ayudar a" can be considered as a unit) and doesn't really have a "meaning" in English.
para + verb is sometimes translated as "in order to + verb (but is not always necessary in English)
"Necesitamos voluntarios ayudar corte el césped".
Your sentence in Spanish would read as "We need volunteers helping you may cut the grass", which makes no sense, of course.
First of all, "to" in that sentence not only indicates that "help" is a verb, but also that it is the action that the previously mentioned "volunteers" are supposed to do. In other words, in this case it helps to convey purpose. Well... Spanish doesn't have something equivalent "to", so we need to indicate purpose with a different mechanism. This mechanism in Spanish is "para" -without this word, the infinitive "ayudar" simply looks as if you just mentioned the verb in the middle of the sentence for no reason.
Ayudar in Spanish is followed by "a" when it introduces a verb, which is infinitive is the context makes it clear who is it supposed to do it.
You basically translated word by word from English, and the result is... well... nonsense. Look what happens when you translate literally:
To me craves that we ourselves may give a turn.
The above sentence, translated word by word makes perfect sense in Spanish.
