19 Comments
DL offered "general" in hints-on hover, so I used "general" and DL marked it wrong. I've seen "общее" used in a lot of ways, such that I'm completely confused by it. In addition to what DL offers in hints-on-hover, "общее" can seem to be used as "ordinary" "usual" "typical" "regular" and probably many more. DL says that, in this sentence, "общее дело" can be translated as "common cause." As does Google. "Common cause" in American English seems to be almost an idiom, probably because of the 1970 US political advocacy group named "Common Cause." Today, especially in the US, many advocacy and lobbying groups now claim to be formed to promote a "common cause." My question is, does "общее дело" have that same, idiom-like flavor, such that any time you see those two words together you know it somehow refers to an advocacy or lobbying effort of some kind?
Yes, it's a kind of an idiom, it's used in this way:
Беречь природу - наше общее дело: It's our common cause to protect nature
Also, there are a bunch of political movements with such a name.
"It is our shared business". Is that acceptable as a translation, though it would change the meaning somewhat...?
"This is our shared business" was accepted on 17 Feb 2016. :-)
Quite a different meaning, though, can it actually mean this?
Is this "business" in the sense of "affair" (as in "that's my business - and not yours!"), or can it also be "business" in the sense of company?
It's more like the English word "affair", Russian would use "компания" to refer to a company.
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Common cause sounds to me as more things has broken down because of one common cause. The term common cause failure is in technical english used very often, but i don't get it in this context.
Why do you think so? I certainly think servolock is on target about the "meat" of the sentence.
what would you say if you are presenting a result of a team work? Like "This is our common work"? Would it not be "Это наше общее дело"?
Could Duolingo accept: "It is our mutual issue."? (Our "our business/affair") it seems difficult to find a good way in English to say that an issue/affair/business is mutual/common/both of ours/joint and still have a grammatically correct expression in English.
