Word
Le reportan la lentitud al operador.
Meaning
They report the slowness to the operator.
Part of speech
sentence
Pronunciation
Course
Breakdown of Le reportan la lentitud al operador.
al
to the
le
to him / to her / to you (formal)
reportar
to report (an incident, problem)
la lentitud
slowness
Questions & Answers about Le reportan la lentitud al operador.
Who exactly is doing the reporting in this sentence if the verb is plural (reportan)?
In Spanish, you can use the third-person plural (the "they" form, like reportan) to talk about an action where the person doing it is unspecified or doesn't matter. It is a common way to avoid the passive voice. It translates to the general "they" in English ("they report the slowness") or to a passive phrase ("the slowness is reported").
Why do we need the pronoun le at the beginning if we already say al operador at the end?
This is called indirect object duplication. Even though al operador explicitly tells us who is receiving the report, Spanish generally requires the indirect object pronoun le to point to that person anyway. Leaving it out here would sound unnatural.
Could I use the passive se here instead to avoid mentioning a specific subject?
How does the word lentitud relate to the word for slow?