"De nouvelles grèves sont encore annoncées."
Translation:Some new strikes are announced again.
26 CommentsThis discussion is locked.
The English translation sounds very odd. Better and more natural to say "New strikes are still being announced"?
This whole section is littered with awkward sounding English. I've found it quite demoralising that I've spent so little time putting in to practice the learning points (e.g il veut que.. and il est possible...) and so much time trying to guess what tortured English I need to use to get marked as correct.
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Somebody please explain, why it is "de nouvelles greves" and not "des nouvelles greves"
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A rule learned from other users:
In the plural, if the adjective comes before the noun, the indefinite article des becomes de (or d').
Surely present perfect continuous would make sense here: "New strikes have been announced again"? These new sentences are all so specific about what tense is acceptable...
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"are announced" is unusual sounding. I'd say "were announced" if the announcing was finished, or "are being announced" if the announcing is still continuing.
Please can some native french speaker tell us what this sentence is intended to mean, because the given english translation doesn't make sense.
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I have to agree that there are a lot of examples of very poor English in this section. I am hoping the French does not contain so many errors.
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The awkward English is a feature; not a bug. The point is to teach you French syntax, which - because it differs from English syntax - will necessarily result in inelegant English sentences. If we were French speakers learning English, the English sentence would be fine, and the French sentence would, also necessarily, be weird.
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I have to agree with Mija438073. It's meaningless English, unless it's a newspaper headline where they need to conserve space but a story follows which explains the headline.
And I simply disagree with you that teaching French structure means giving as translations such ridiculous English. Duolingo, their protests to the contrary, doesn't actually care about teaching French; things like this can be presented (say, in a class), ending with something like, "In other words, this means . . . " and a good English translation. Duo doesn't want to be bothered with all that work.
OK, it's free, and it's worth the price. Barely.
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Mija438073 didn't say that it's meaningless English. She said that the translation is wrong, but it is not. And it just doesn't matter that no one would speak the English sentence - learning a language is not the same thing as translating a language. French syntax is not going to be learned if all of the English sentences here are forcibly morphed into something that would not translate back into the French sentence.
I don't know how to respond to the unsupportable claim that a company that teaches languages doesn't care about teaching languages, but i do know that you have choices if you don't like how they teach: 1. Don't use it. 2. Suggest to Duolingo that they add paraphrasing (or anything else you might want). It's almost a surety that they will not see it here on a forum page for a specific exercise.
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@Bumbersnatch, could I please ask a favour? Could you please provide some extra words around the sentence that would put it into a believable context? I have been trying to come up with a scenario where that English phrasing would be used, and I can't get it to make sense.
Because I want to agree with you that it's a feature, not a bug. But without the additional blurbs at the start of the lesson, like the earlier modules, we don't have any context for what the phrase is trying to teach us about the French or its English equivalent.
I do agree that it's helpful to have a transliterated version; it's something that helps me parse what the French grammar is doing in the sentence, but we need an extra line then to describe the intended meaning, even if that extra meaning is far from the transliteration.
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@schmy - I hope i understand your question well enough to give a decent answer. I don't think that the English phrasing would ever be used, but i think that's the feature that looks like a bug. I take the sentence to mean something like They've announced that there will be more strikes. This is a somewhat better sentence in English, but would translate to a very different French sentence, and so would not be teaching us the French syntax.
I may be wrong, but i imagine that you're tripped up by some in this sentence. Strikes in this context would translate not as grèves, but rather des grèves, so we get some in the back translation (since there is a modifier between des and grèves, des becomes de).
Often enough, i have to translate between Russian and English. My approach to this is necessarily to grasp the meaning, throw out the original sentence - just forget it, and construct a new one in the other language in a way that conveys the intended meaning. If i start translating before the sentence is finished, i will often have to backtrack and start again thanks to differing syntaxes. This effect is less extreme between French and English, but it still exists.
So when i come across a sentence in Duolingo whose meaning is opaque to me, i ask about it in the forum. If i don't get an answer, it's all right because i understand that i've learned something about French syntax anyway.
It seems to me that, in the end, a few nonsensical sentences among thousands do no damage to your language learning. Probably, they do some good.
I hope this helps. If not, i can take another stab at it if you like.
Is it possible to say, "Deux nouvelles grèves sont encore annoncées."
Thank you. I hear the difference when I concentrate on the sound, but didn't notice it in the sentence.
I wrote, "The new strikes are being announced again" ... Rejected of course!
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Because the French sentence doesn't say "LES nouvelles grèves..." Also, I don't know for sure if using the progressive in English is verboten, but it's likely because the French sentence is saying that the announcing has already been done.
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But this will certainly be rejected, since you don't include anything corresponding to the "encore". I suspect your use of past tense will also be rejected.
