5 ms·

The original English is ungrammatical, or at least incomplete; it helps a bit if you start from grammatical English. So first alter it to "She HAD said goodbye

• wunderland 3y ago
  Both “she said goodbye too many times before” and “she had said goodbye too many times before” are grammatically correct English. They have slightly different meanings.
  • denton-scratch 3y ago
    Agreed; "she said goodbye too many times before" is grammatical. But it's temporally ambiguous. The sentence is reporting on a time in the past, a time when "her" utterances were even further in the past. I suggested rephrasing prior to translation, to clarify the tense of "said". As someone upthread noted, it's a song, so prosody is more important than grammar. But I think it's still an ugly construction. [Edit] I'm not sure what tense it is; I'm a native English speaker, and I don't think I was ever taught the grammar of my own language. I don't think it's past-perfect/pluperfect; that would be "she has said" (she has finished saying it). Wikipedia disagrees, but doesn't say what tense "she has said" is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluperfect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluperfect
• burkaman 3y ago
  That would be the past perfect tense, a different tense with a different meaning that is only used in the context of another past event you're talking about. The original quote is simple past tense and is correct. You could also use the present perfect, "she has said goodbye too many times before", which sounds slightly better to me, but is again a different tense and implies the goodbye-saying is an ongoing phenomenon. If it's all in the past, this tense would be wrong.