In にて (JLPT N2) | Bunpro – Japanese Grammar Explained :
Why is 予約をされる場合は電話にてご連絡ください translated to “if you want to make a reservation, please make one using phone”?
Shouldn’t the Japanese be 予約をされたい for it to translate to “want to”?
Do される and されたい mean the same thing in this context? If so, why, and why was される used over されたい?
Thanks a lot in advance for your time and consideration on this topic 🙇🏻♂️
This looks like it was just to make the English sound more natural, as the literal ‘In the case of a reservation being made, please contact us by phone’ would sound a bit strange in English.
されたい would probably not work here, as されたい means ‘to want to have done for/to you’ in the same way as してもらいたい. However, seeing as this される is probably just the polite passive, it is possible that されたい would work purely from a meaning perspective ‘If you want to have a reservation made for you’. Let’s see if @Chihiro or @Fuga can put a native speaker’s opinion on it.
Here’s a small excerpt from a weblio article on されたい itself.
別表記：為れたい
「～してもらいたい」という意味の意味回し。動詞の連用形に付き、主に希望・指示・命令の意味合いを丁寧に述べる表現。文語的な硬めの文章においては、「され（る）」は 動詞「する」の尊敬表現であり、「（し）たい」が話し手の希望の意を表す。「（し）たい」を古語の語彙に置き換えて「されたし」と表現する場合もある。
As @Asher has said, it was translated like this to make the English sound more natural. 予約をされる場合は translates directly as ‘In the situation that you are going to buy…’.
Although the English sentence ‘In the situation that you are going to buy…’ does not use ‘if’, you can tell that the sentence is talking about a hypothetical situation, and this is similar to the nuance of the Japanese sentence (it does not explicitly say ‘if’, but it is heavily implied). You could say 予約をされたい方は… but that sounds a bit too casual in this context.
Hope that clears it up! 