"The students are protesting and putting up posters."

Translation: Les étudiants manifestent et mettent des affiches.

[Elon_the_Hittite]

Surely 'ils mettent" would both look and sound better? I thought that you couldn't have a conjugated verb without a preceding noun or pronoun anyhow.

[TimmyKilminster]

It certainly shouldn't be wrong.

[relox84]

When to verb phrases are connected with a conjunction like et, ou, puis... and have the same subject, the pronoun is optional for the second verb just like in English. It is always correct, but sometimes it can sound quite unnatural. Here though it's perfectly fine, and repeating ils would sound a bit clumsy -people do speak like that casually, but it's very informal.

[TonyHimsel]

I thought the second verb is always in infinitive form like manifestent et mettre?

[EsterCJ827]

Ils mettent should have been accepted

[Cath911029]

I find this strange. I put up the correct answer: "Les étudiants manifestent et mettent des affiches" and then tried it out in Google translate, which gave me this result: "Students demonstrate and put up posters." I did get it right, but I wonder about the translation, particularly as (if I recall correctly) the first example in this exercise gave a different translation, something like "Les étudiants en manifestent et mettent des affiches," which gives the same translation: "Students demonstrate and put up posters" on Google translate. I may be remembering the first example incorrectly, of course, but I find this odd.

[TimmyKilminster]

I wouldn’t use Google Translate as anything more than a starting-point for translation. I certainly wouldn’t cite it as any form of authority (though it’s a smart move if you’re stuck on an exercise here, since it appears that it’s the DL staff’s first resource!).