Understanding 「どうやって償いをしたらいいのでしょうか。」

Question

Consider

どうやって償いをしたらいいのでしょうか。

How can I make it up to you?

For some reason this is a particularly difficult sentence for me to understand how the translation has been derived. My first guess:

(どうやって)(償いをしたらいい)(のでしょうか)。

(how does)(if reparations are done, is-good)(it seems)?

->

How can it be done so that (it would seem that) (if reparations are done, it would be good)?

->

How can it be done so that it would seem like things are good between us?

->

How can I make it up to you?

Another approach is to consider it piecewise:

1. 「(償いをしたらいい)」 means "if reparations are done, it would be good".
2. Adding 「のでしょうか」 to the end makes it "it seems that if reparations would be done, it would be good, no?"
3. Adding 「どうやって」 to the beginning makes it "how is it done so that if reparations would be performed, it would be good?"
4. Converting this into idiomatic English makes it "how can I make it up to you?"

Perhaps this is more intuitive. Is this more or less correct? Or is there something about the grammar/the way I'm parsing this out that isn't quite right?

Answer 1

The problem is that in English, we cannot put question words in subclauses like that, so let's replace どう with そう. We split the sentence like this:

• そうやって償いをした - I made it up to you like this
• そうやって償いをしたら - If I made it up to you like this
• そうやって償いをしたらいいのでしょうか。- If I made it up to you like this, would it be good?

Now introduce どう: "What would it be, that if I made it up to you like that, it would be good?"