Literal translation
he is down in the dumps, broke
Meaning
he's down on his luck, broke
Explanation
This expression describes a person in need, caught up in a passing or lasting material hardship. The word dins, well attested, means in, during, and places the person inside a state, without naming it directly. The second word, rendered as down and out, does not appear in our reference dictionaries, which calls for caution about its exact origin: according to the figurative sense given for the whole expression, it denotes a state of hardship or financial bad luck, very close to the familiar French word débine, itself drawn from nineteenth century popular slang and widely spread through southern speech in contact with French. The expression thus likely belongs to that shared body of casual vocabulary between spoken Provençal and popular French, more than to the oldest and most properly dialectal Mistralian lexicon. It is used in everyday conversation to signal, in a sympathetic or resigned tone, that a person is going through a bad financial patch.