El apuntador lee la acotación.

Because lee is the third-person singular form of the verb leer in the present tense.

The subject is El apuntador = the prompter, which is he / it in grammatical terms, so Spanish uses:

• yo leo = I read
• tú lees = you read
• él/ella/usted lee = he/she/you read

So El apuntador lee means The prompter reads.

In standard Spanish, lee is pronounced with two vowel sounds: le-e.

A rough guide for an English speaker is LEH-eh, said smoothly.

This happens because it comes from leer, and the two e vowels are both pronounced. It is not usually pronounced like a single English lee.

Because Spanish nouns have grammatical gender.

• apuntador is masculine, so it takes el
• acotación is feminine, so it takes la

So:

• el apuntador
• la acotación

This does not necessarily mean the thing itself is biologically male or female; it is just how the noun is classified grammatically.

Many feminine nouns end in -a, but not all of them do. Nouns ending in -ción are very commonly feminine.

So:

• la acotación
• la canción
• la información
• la conversación

A useful rule is: if a noun ends in -ción, it is usually feminine.

Here, acotación is a noun. In a theatre or literary context, it usually means a stage direction or author’s note/instruction in the text.

So in this sentence, la acotación is the thing being read.

Grammatically:

• El apuntador = subject
• lee = verb
• la acotación = direct object

Because this is a normal direct object, and la acotación is not a person.

Spanish uses the personal a mainly before specific people (and sometimes pets or personified beings), for example:

• Veo a María
• Escucho a mi profesor

But with a thing such as la acotación, there is no personal a:

• Lee la acotación

The infinitive is leer, which means to read.

It is an -er verb, but it has a small spelling/pronunciation pattern because of the vowels:

• leer
• leo
• lees
• lee
• leemos
• leéis
• leen

Learners often notice that many of these forms have two vowels together.

The written accent shows where the stress falls: a-co-ta-CIÓN.

Without the accent, Spanish spelling rules would suggest a different stress pattern. The accent mark tells you that the final syllable is stressed.

This is very common with nouns ending in -ción:

• nación
• situación
• acotación

Yes. If the person is female, you can use la apuntadora.

So:

• El apuntador lee la acotación = the male prompter reads the stage direction
• La apuntadora lee la acotación = the female prompter reads the stage direction

This is a normal masculine/feminine noun pair in Spanish.

Yes, but the original order is the most neutral and straightforward:

• El apuntador lee la acotación

Spanish can change word order for emphasis or style, for example:

• La acotación la lee el apuntador

That version emphasizes la acotación or clarifies who reads it, but it is less neutral.

For a learner, the basic pattern to remember is:

subject + verb + object

Not especially in everyday conversation for most learners. It is more likely to appear in theatre-related contexts.

In general Spanish, apuntar often means things like:

• to write down
• to note
• to point
• to aim

But apuntador in this sentence refers to a specific role, typically in theatre: the person who prompts lines or reads cues.

So it is a specialized vocabulary item rather than a very common daily word.

Yes. Since la acotación is a feminine singular direct object, you can replace it with la:

• El apuntador la lee

This means The prompter reads it.

That is a very useful pattern in Spanish:

• la acotación → la
• el libro → lo
• las acotaciones → las
• los libros → los