"The taxi drivers are drivers."
Translation:Taximetriștii sunt șoferi.
4 Comments
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In English, the sentence is so obvious that it would not be said. Or, it would be revised to something like: 'The taxi drivers are drivers, too.'
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However, given that it's a general statement, it would have to be "Taxi drivers are drivers too." :)
Maybe a better sentence would have been "Taximetriștii sunt foarte buni șoferi." ("Taxi drivers are very good drivers.")
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If it were a 'general statement', would there be two 'ii's at the end of 'taximetristii'?
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Yes, in Romanian it would have to be "Taximetriștii" with two "ii"s at the end (definite article). You cannot say "Taximetriști sunt șoferi." It is grammatically incorrect. You can, however, say "Unii taximetriști sunt șoferi buni." ("Some taxi drivers are good drivers.")
In English, where this whole "general statement" rule seems to be applicable the original sentence would have to be "Taxi drivers are drivers."
The use of the definite article differs between Romance languages and English/other Germanic languages and I recently provided a Spanish example here:
https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/27392109
EDIT: With all that being said, what constitutes a general statement can be subjective. I recently came across two Spanish sentences in a row and to me it seemed like they were both "general statements" (they were even using the same noun), but to my surprise the second one was translated to English using the definite article. There was much debate about this in the comments.