How does this sentence mean what my book says it does?
"No se te olvide nunca que siempre alguien te va a leer."
This sentence appears in my book in a portion about a Chilean writer with the following translation: "Don't ever forget that there will always be somebody who will read you (your work)"
Can someone explain how that translates?
3 Answers
76 views and yet no one has tackled this. It's hard to explain in a few short sentences just how something translates, because it requires an understanding of sentence construction and grammar-- you can't translate by replacing English words with Spanish ones.
Maybe this will help: do not ever (no....nunca) let it be forgotten to you (se te olvide) that (que) always (siempre) someone (alguien) you (te) is going to read (va a leer).
That's a little rough, but will hopefully help you see how the structure works!
No se te olvide nunca que siempre alguien te va a leer.
No se te olvide nunca = Don't ever forget
que siempre alguien te va a leer = that always someone is going to read you.
OK, I assume the first part is the challenging part, yes?
It could also have been "No olvide nunca" = Do not ever forget (double negative).
But often olvidar is written in a passive reflexive construction, which I suppose in this case literally means "Don't forget itself to you ever..." It is supposedly a way of shifting responsibility from he who forgets, so that it is the thing forgotten that is doing the forgetting, not the one who actually forgets.
If you google "olvidarse" you'll come up with some explanations. Here is a discussion from SpanishDict.
This winds up being an awkward construction in English if you try to translate it literally, but the translation they give is correct. For me the odd bit is the first part - No se te olvide nunca. It's the verb olvidarse kind of sort of being used in the impersonal sense, with the pronoun te being used to indicate who the forgetting is affecting. Literally it's sort of like "Let it never be forgotten by you...".
The rest of it is pretty straightforward. siempre alguien te va a leer = someone is always going to read you.
Welcome to the forum, by the way. Good question.
