"This teacher supports all her students."
Translation:Cette prof soutient tous ses étudiants.
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Puisque lʼanglais dit, “this teacher supports all her students,” on sait que la prof est une femme, donc on utilise « cette prof ». Si lʼanglais avait utilisé “they” singulier au lieu de “her,” on ne sait pas le sexe du professeur, auquel cas les deux sexes auraient dû être acceptés.
I don't understand the use of soutient with prof; isn't that a third person plural verb ending?
Soutenir is conjugated the same as tenir. Il tient/soutient, ils tiennent/ soutiennent.
Why the reflexive is not being used here? Cette prof se soutient tous ses étudiants.
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Reflexives are used when you're doing something to yourself, or she is doing something for herself (etc etc etc). I'm trying to think of an example of a commonly used French verb with and without the "se" form but my mind's gone blank!
In English, think of "the mother lays her baby down to sleep" versus "the mother lays (herself) down to sleep". I think this might work in the French (pretend that it does if it doesn't!), but the point is that the mother is doing something to someone else in the first instance, so no reflexive needed, whereas she's doing it to herself in the second, hence it's needed - whether you'd bother using the "self" bit in English or not.
Basically, if it can be even implied in English, it's most likely going to be reflexive in French. (I never say always when it comes to languages. Guaranteed cockup if I do!)
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"Ce professeur" est refusé alors que c'est la traduction la plus académique. L'autorisation de feminiser un grand nombre de noms est récente en France et très peu utilisée dans l'écriture. DL devrait accepter cette traduction classique.
adityafallh, you're missing Tacrut's point. Traditionally le professeur was used for both male and female teachers. In older writing, you will see this.
Good point. I think the reason DL has started to favour "prof" is that it is a way for the sentence constructors to avoid taking a stand in the debate on the question of "le professeur" for all vs "le/la professeur/e".
Just read a news article about France not feminizing traditionally masculine nouns. They state it damages the language! Even though I don't know why a car is female, I do agree that romance languages are strongly based in genders of words and "wokeness" deciding to invent duplicate genders for some words seems quite silly.