chloe

[safe saddle]

Please be patient

Our volunteers look into many questions every day; sometimes it takes them a little while to answer.

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[glacial zealot]

tbh idk, on is more of "we" lmao

[tropic vapor]

I feel like the passive on would've been a better translation since we're not talking about a specific someone but rather using « on » as a sort of dummy subject to express a passive voice

so not, 'Someone stole the monkeys from the zoo' but 'The monkeys were stolen from the zoo'

[strong condor]

but if you wanted to use passive voice wouldn't it be more clear to just say "les singes ont été volé du zoo"

like even though i know you can technically do a passive construction using on, that just seems like the most ambiguous possible way to say it lol. like if i heard that sentence i'd understand it as "we" 100% of the time

[tropic vapor]

Yes but in French it's much much more common to use the active voice to express passivity in this regards. For example, if I wanted to translate, 'The door is being knocked', I would tend to use « On frappe à la porte » or « La porte se frappe » more than « Quelqu'un frappe à la porte » or « La porte est frappée »

[strong condor]

interesting, thanks!

so in a situation like this is there a way to intuit whether someone's using passive voice or not or is it just context based