"明天是她的生日,我想送花给她。"
Translation:It is her birthday tomorrow, I want to give her flowers.
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1256
Surely the phrase 送花给 does not translate in English to 'give her flowers', but instead 'send her flowers'. Otherwise it would be 给她花 with no 送. Am I right?
1613
"It is her birthday tomorrow. I want to send her flowers" still not accepted. Reported 18th October 2018.
1881
This is a very ordinary type construction that has both a direct object, flowers / 花, and an indirect object, the recipient, her / 她. There are two main things, however, that can be sources of confusion, and these are the words 送 and 给, that each have more than one meaning or use. In addition to meaning send, deliver, carry, or send/ see off, 送 is also used to mean give as a gift. And finally, although we may initially learn 给 only as the verb to give, it is also routinely used to indicate the indirect object of a transitive verb (the recipient of the direct object) as well as to indicate a person for the sake or benefit of whom something is done. No obscure structure here, just straight forward stuff, once you realize that in Chinese, like English and other languages, many words have more than one meaning or use. Learning to sort this out, however, is one of the tough parts of language learning, and if it gives us any solace, is one of several big challenges still facing machine translators.