Non glielo dica.

is it really “don’t tell them” ?

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Ciao. I would have thought “Don’t tell him”. Wonder what others think;-)

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Agreed. I would expect “Don’t tell them” to be “Non [lo] dica [a] loro”.

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My grammar book says that gli is sometimes used for loro, in informal communication. It lists the following as having the same meaning:

Glielo dirò. (informal)
Lo dirò a loro.
Lo dirò loro.

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Ah thank you, I had recalled something similar, but couldn’t find any authoritative sources for it quickly, so thought I had perhaps misremembered.

Italian always likes to keep us on our toes, eh? :wink:

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Indeed. I have learned from native speakers this would be commonly used as such.

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English Translation

Don’t tell them.

This one is definitely in need of the context. Something like “Shush! They are coming! Don’t tell them!” Though zzcguns is much better at writing the context, I see why “gli” here is not “to him” or “to her”. May I have a suggestion to CM: have a little snippet of the context, so it is not a guessing game.

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Sadly I don’t think this will be possible to implement, since the sentences come from Tatoeba, where they don’t have any context either, though in a few cases a source might have been mentioned.

If I understood correctly, the whole point of the Tatoeba corpus is to try to cover all these possible links back and forth between the different translations among language pairings. I recall seeing somewhere in the translation instructions along the lines of explicitly not including indications of person or number if a clear distinction in the source sentence can’t be carried over into the target language.

Something that did seem to have been provided here once upon a time, and which I would love to see return (at least as a toggle-able extra option), is to have all the alternative translations available for that source sentence displayed after answering (like it is done in some Collections).

Accepting all as alternative answers might also be a nice additional option, but I think I would likely not enable that, since with that I would likely end up just always typing the one I was already familiar/comfortable with, and thus not learn the more “obscure” versions.

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