"O papel dos professores é fundamental."

Translation: The role of teachers is crucial.

[rolosrevenge]

So I interpreted this as "The professors' paper is fundamental." as in the particular professors have written a fundamental research paper on a topic. In my work as a research engineer, that is a common sentence to utter.

[Importuno]

I dunno if you are portuguse, but it is not common. in Brazil at least. We don't call researches "papers" here. Role is the perfect translation in this sentence.

[rolosrevenge]

I'm American. We call an article in a research journal a paper. I didn't say that sentence would be common in every day speech, but it would be common in the research community. My question is then, how do you say" the professors' paper is fundamental" in Portuguese?

[Davu]

You can get an idea by searching for "research paper" in a database of translations here: http://www.linguee.com/english-portuguese/.

Based on the results the most common form is the ambiguous phrase "trabalho de pesquisa" but "artigo de pesquisa" works too.

[rolosrevenge]

Ah, you'd call it an artigo then.

[Oinophilos]

This is an IDIOM. the point is to show us that Papel has two meanings. It's the same in Spanish, I think

[paddyobrien]

So I said the role of THE teachers is crucial and they didn't accept? Surely the dos here implies specific teachers? The role of teachers (in general) would be o papel de professores?

[derick.cha]

The teachers role is fundamental is correct

[Oinophilos]

No, it has to be the teachers' role. The apostrophe is necessary, and it has to go after the s. Duo doesn't know that yet, so they should do their homework

[AndrewNico178454]

I believe DuoLingo ignores punctuation (try some experiments). It would take a lot of not-very-productive coding to change that. Meanwhile we can provide answers that don't depend on punctuation for correctness.

[MariaSilfverberg]

What is the portuguese Word for "professor" ?

[marijke.va1]

Why is the teachers paper wrong ?

[Davu]

The word "papel" can mean both "paper" (the substance) and "role", so technically "teachers' paper" is not wrong but "é fundamental" at the end of the sentence suggests "role" is the best choice here.

[Fonseman]

dos professores -> of the teachers; why is the article "gone" , is it also correct wth the article, that is how i translated it ...

[RaeOvHope]

Thus audio sucks