"Que se le ofrece" ?

Question

I saw a dialog in a Spanish exercise book, and there is a sentence which appears like the above. I cannot understand the sentence grammatically. How should I understand the above sentence?

"Que se le ofrece?" would translate to "What can be offered to you?" or "What can I offer you?". The "I" being implied in the second translation. - ecdoesit, Dec 2, 2014

Answer 1

Grammatically you can consider it as passive (from the English point of view), so "se ofrece" would be "is offered", and "le" obviously means "to you" (usted). More or less, it would be:

What can it offered to you today?

Notice that in Spanish we use questions in present for politeness, e.g. "¿Me pone una cerveza?" is literally "Do you serve me a beer?", but in English you'd ask "Can I have a beer?", so I had to use "can" in the above sentence to make it sound a bit less strange that it already is, because in Spanish there is no "can" anywhere.

Basically, it is a polite way of addressing someone avoiding the use of "I".

Rather than asking someone to place a beer on you - "pone," you could ask them to serve you a beer or give you one by replacing "pone" with "puede servir" or "da." "Can" in Spanish is "puede." - ecdoesit, Dec 2, 2014

Answer 2

At first I too was perplexed by the use of "se le ofrece" as I wasn't aware that ofrecer could be used as a pronomial, however it can be.

In this case se is a reflexive pronoun, and le is as usual an indirect object pronoun.

If you look up ofrecer in the online dictionary you will find the use of que se le ofrecer and its meaning.