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Subject:Re: Passive voice From:Vicki Rosenzweig <murphy!acmcr!vr -at- UUNET -dot- UU -dot- NET> Date:Fri, 4 Feb 1994 13:23:40 EST
Writing English to make life easier for translators strikes me as,
to some extent, missing the point. Good, clear prose should in general
be easier, but I would not, for example, expect a writer in German or
Japanese to choose constructs that are easier to translate into
English if it was at the expense of the original text. I also have
doubts about the assertion that material in the passive voice is
easier to translate into Romance languages: it certainly doesn't
match my knowledge of Spanish (in which I am not fluent, but I do
have a reading knowledge and can hold a conversation in it if the
person I'm speaking to speaks slowly).
Vicki Rosenzweig
vr%acmcr -dot- uucp -at- murphy -dot- com
New York, NY
