> I’m asking because it is my native language and the entire phrase, including “before”, is clear to me.

It is a common phenomenon for people to claim that sentences are perfectly clear to them when, objectively, those sentences do not have a meaning at all. On Language Log they occasionally discuss "Escher sentences", with the prototype example being "More people have been to France than I have".

> “Before” is a temporal indicator. You could replace it with another temporal indicator and the phrase would still make sense, For example, “She said goodbye too many times today”. You wouldn’t ask what the antecedent is for “today”. Same with “before”.

Except I can see what's happening with "She said goodbye too many times today." That sentence will be followed up with some explanation of the consequences of having said goodbye too many times.

In the chorus, the intent might have been that the line "she said goodbye too many times before" is an explanation of the preceding line (that's how people are interpreting it here). Or the line might just have been thrown in with no rhyme or reason, completely disconnected from the rest of the song. But regardless of the intent, the line has failed to connect to the sentence before it or the sentence after it, which means that we cannot determine what it's trying to say.

> You wouldn’t ask what the antecedent is for “today”. Same with “before”.

Moving back to this, it's necessary to ask what exactly "before" is referring to because the question came up of whether and how it should be represented in the Latin translation. It might conceivably refer to "before now" (in which case the suggestion of Latin perfect tense is fine), "before some point identified by the context" (you'd want pluperfect, if the point was in the past, or future perfect if the point was in the future [or of course perfect if the point is "now"]), or "before some specific event" (you'd want the preposition ante, and you'd also need to mention the event).