"Dile que lo envíen." (Spanish-English)

[Runa27]

Hi! Well, they say you learn by doing, you learn a language by thinking about the language, making it make sense to you, maybe sharing it. Well, maybe that's not how "they" put it, but in my experience, it helps.

So, I'm watching one of my favorite shows, "Firefly", with the DVD's Spanish subtitles turned on, with the idea in my mind to take notes on the odd-seeming parts of the translation and figure out why they translated them that way, to write them up later and share them amongst interested people and to learn something of Spanish in the process.

And I got two lines in before I was completely confused as to why they'd translate it that way or even what the translation means.

The original English line was in response to the information that the command (el mando) wanted to wait to find out their status before sending in air support (apoyo aéreo), and it was "Our status is [that] we need some gorram air support. Now get back on [the] line and tell them to get in here." The word "gorram" is one of the show's created words, a substitute for "god****", and in this case would be used as just an intensifier (to emphasize how much they need it), so don't worry so much about that one.

My problem is the way they translated it... the first sentence makes sense: "Lo necesitamos." It lacks some of the proverbial punch of the original, but I know what they're trying to say, at least; they need it (the air support, el "apoyo aéreo").

The second line, however, reads: "Dile que lo envíen. "

I tried using my electronic dictionary to help translate this but all I got was something about "It's delirious/raving/talking nonsense that they're sending" or "It's delirious/raving/talking nonsense what they're sending."

Is this an idiom I'm not aware of? My instinct is to say that maybe it's the equivalent of "This is ridiculous.", but that does not translate the original line, really, and I don't want to assume something about an idiom I haven't encountered before.

Any help would be much appreciated!


-Runa27

[ldngli]

My Spanish is laughable (see the countless corrections they made to a text of mine in the Lokanova Spanish forum).

However my understanding of that subtitle is "We need it! Do tell them to send it".

The way I see it, the first verb is "decir" (to tell + "le" for them, him or her); the second is "enviar" (to send).

[Runa27]

My Spanish is laughable (see the countless corrections they made to a text of mine in the Lokanova Spanish forum).

However my understanding of that subtitle is "We need it! Do tell them to send it".

The way I see it, the first verb is "decir" (to tell + "le" for them, him or her); the second is "enviar" (to send).

It's possible. There was another line in the show that clearly was supposed to include the word "tell", yet it also read as "dile" (which presumably means it's a typo... that occured twice. It's not just me, either, the "c" looks very different from "l" in the subtitles and I rewound several times to check that I was getting the right phrase including the spelling, those are definitely "l"s). The translator(s?) also translated the show's idiomatic phrase "We're humped." as "Perdidos", which my dictionary says is more like "lost" or "straying", forgot to include Malcolm's rank or Sergeant (sargento) in the opening line, translated the line "We choked them with those words" as "we made them swallow those words" (seriously. HUGE difference between "choke" and "swallow"! Technically, they're opposites. That's just disturbing! ), seemed to have misspelled "fastidio" as "fastido", translated the series' delibrately shortened 'verse to universe (really, now. If you translated it directly, as "verso", it'd be exactly the same as it is in English, meaning-wise! I mean, it's supposed to have an earthy poeticness to it.)...

I'm starting to wonder if the Spanish subtitles were as much of a rush job as I've heard the Spanish dub was.

EDIT: But that doesn't mean I don't want a second opinion.

-Runa27