"저는 동료가 많다고 말했습니다."

Translation: I said I have many colleagues.

[OKAMOTO_Yusuke]

It should be "I said I had many colleagues" because of the sequence of tenses. "I said I have many colleagues" does not comply with the sequence of tenses and should be marked incorrect. Reported on Dec. 17, 2017.

[oee16]

In English, tense backshifting in reported speech/indirect quotes is applied most of the times, but not always.

Backshifting is:

• optional if the situation is still true

• not applicable for general truth.

Avoid backshifting if the original verb (tense used in the direct quote) is

• in past perfect

• could/might/would/should.

Backshifting is optional in the given example. Neither you nor DLG is wrong. Just a matter of DLG accepting your suggestion as an alternative answer.

[Flash36]

'had' implies you no longer have 'many colleagues'. When relaying the same information someone didnt hear, the statement remains true in its tense with past tense 'said' coming in to play.

The actual sentence should include quotations as; 'I said "I have many colleagues."'

[Iron_Venema]

Not saying you're incorrect, but how do you say "I said i have many colleagues", then?

[masterfuyu]

Korean has a very different syntactic structure from English so having only one "correct" translation is pretty blasphemous - the 고 morpheme translates as "that" directly and "many" and "a lot" mean the same thing, so my translation of "I said that I have a lot of colleagues" should be correct (and is a more natural English translation in my opinion).

[nleconte]

Flag it. It has nothing to do with blasphemy, rather with Duolingo's crowdsourced approach of having beta users submit alternative translations whenever necessary. Thanks ;)