Re: French translation of notation-appendices.itely breaks make web

[Valentin Villenave]

2009/1/16 Carl D. Sorensen <address@hidden>:

> The git version of Documentation/fr/user/notation-appendices.itely is
> missing a node, which causes make web to fail.

Thanks, applied.

> P.S. I have a question about a style issue.  In notation-appendices.itely,
> there are lots of section introductions that begin "Vous pouvez .....".
> When I took French many years ago, I was taught that preferred French style
> would be "On peut ...".

Mmm, tricky. I think as a general rule, we'd prefer to say "on" where
you'd say "you"; generally speaking, I always try to apply Graham's
rule that is "don't refer to the reader directly", and the French
sentence did need to go IMO. That being said, "on" is often not very
elegant, and therefore I have replaced it with a passive sentence
("the following commands may be used inside...").

> Is this a change in French style, or was what I learned just wrong?  If both
> "Vous pouvez" and "On peut" are acceptable, can you give me some guideline
> as to when I would use one or the other?

Well, the lines tend to blur these days. "On" is now most commonly
used as a slang substitute for "we" ("on va manger" iso "nous allons
manger"). Secondly, since we're constantly exposed to badly-translated
American books and TV shows, many people of bad taste (mostly in
advertising) tend to use "vous" or "tu" instead of "on" when
explaining a general rule ("vous êtes libre" iso "on est libre"). Now,
this is just plain ugly, but very fashionable in ads nevertheless.

Cheers,
Valentin