Re: Getting involved

[Trevor Bača]

On 12/27/06, Till Rettig <address@hidden> wrote:
>  Ok, I see, I was quite unclear. First about this mentioned passive forms:
> Direkt imperative as in English sounds in German somehow unpolite, maybe
> indeed the "active" style that Han-Wen mentioned. Actually it is some kind
> of passive form ("so you can see what is going on" would be translated
> "damit man sehen kann, was passiert"). So I mean here this German "man" form
> speaking about passive.

Ah, you mean "impersonal" rather than "passive".

"Passive" is one of three grammatical *voices* available in European
languages (active, middle, passive) whereas the German
"man"-construction is an example of the impersonal *pronoun*, just
like French "on".

The German "... damit man sehen kann, was passiert" is in the active
voice and, as such, doesn't arouse the type of ire that grammarians
reserve for the passive. (Note that the passive does exist in German,
but requires some form of "werden", as in "Der Brief wird von mir
geschrieben".)

AFAICS, German "man" and French "on" still sound perfectly natural and
are the unmarked impersonal constructions. Note that English has an
equivalent construction with the impersonal pronoun "one", as in "this
way, one can see what's going on". But the acceptability of impersonal
"one" in English varies greatly by both dialect and register. British
English -- especially written British English -- seems to still manage
the construction unselfconsciously, but it sounds horribly stilted to
my American ears.

So, as it turns out, you're really advocating for impersonal pronouns
(instead of second-person pronouns) in the German translations, and
not the passive voice. Impersonal German "man" should be fine; it's
the passive that might be troublesome ...


--
Trevor Bača
address@hidden