A new cleaning woman is coming in today. I want to have her not clean my drawing table. How do you say…
Please don’t clean this table.
… in spanish?
thanks
According to Yahoo | Mail, Weather, Search, Politics, News, Finance, Sports & Videos “Don’t clean this table” translates to “No limpie esta tabla”.
and “please” is “pro favor”.
NO CLEANO DE TABLEO!(shouted of course) should work.
Por favor, no limpia esta mesa.
Where I live,
“table” is “mesa”, not “tabla”
though there might be some regional variants.
It’s “por favor” not “pro favor”.
I don’t know whether it should be “limpie” or “limpia”. (too long since high school Spanish, and conjugating verbs wasn’t my best subject, anyway) But your accent will probably be so thick, it won’t matter.
[Moderating]
I would really encourage people to in GQ to never ever use Babelfish as a response to a request for a translation in a language they don’t understand. Babelfish is almost always worse than useless, except to get a vague sense of what a written text might be about.
[/Moderating off]
In this case, while tabla has a variety of meanings, it is not usually used in the sense of a table as a piece of furniture, which is mesa. In your phrase you might be asking the cleaning lady not to clean your multiplication table.
The polite request would be Por favor, no limpie esta mesa. This would be best to use with a cleaning lady, especially one you have not met before. If addressing a family member or close friend, you might use the informal form limpia.
If you’re addressing her with usted rather than tú (which you should do, being a polite person), it should be limpie as the third person subjunctive. The second person subjunctive (for tú) ought to be limpies.
However, since this is a request, in this case the imperative should be used, which is the same as the third person indicative, that is, limpia.
Unless the request is in the negative, in which case the imperative is replaced by the subjunctive (link, about halfway down).
Ah, yes. I stand corrected.