Please help me translate "Me tocaba desempeñar..."

Question

Hola!

I'm trying to translate the following phrase to English but finding it quite difficult:

"Me tocaba desempeñar se encargaron de martirizarme todos los di?as."

From the dictionary on the site, the verbs translate as:

• tocarse = to touch
• desempeñar = to carry out
• encargar = to order, to put someone in charge of, to handle
• martirizarme = to martyr, to torture

But I can't understand what the complete sentence means.

If anyone could help, it would be very much appreciated.

Muchas gracias, Rangi

Are you sure that this is the whole sentence? Has some little word been left out. There should be something between "desempeñar" and "se.". - Daniela2041, Nov 27, 2015

Sorry for the confusion guys and thanks very much for your help. The original, complete sentence from my Spanish text book is: - Rangi, Nov 30, 2015

"Pero el desconocimiento de la ciudad y el no haber tenido un entrenamiento previo en la actividad que me tocaba desempeñar se encargaron de martirizarme todos los días." - Rangi, Nov 30, 2015

Answer 1

This is a strange sentence and rather sad. I think there is a ' que ' missing.I think it should be ' que se encargaron de'. It means something like:

It fell on me to see to it that they took charge of making me a martyr evey day. // It was up to me to arrange that they saw to torturing me every day.

I could probably improve on the translation if I had more context.

Thanks for your reply. Sorry, I had tried to make the sentence smaller but I must have broken it. The complete sentence from my text book was: - Rangi, Nov 30, 2015

"Pero el desconocimiento de la ciudad y el no haber tenido un entrenamiento previo en la actividad que me tocaba desempeñar se encargaron de martirizarme todos los días." - Rangi, Nov 30, 2015