In the Realm of the Tenses

One of the French teammates posted the translation on Sulis. As I can speak French, I checked her translation. Since I've been living in an English speaking country for a few months, reading French was a bit unusual.

The translation looks good. At the same time, it wasn't very difficult, as we agreed to write the instructions as simple as possible, because we were supposed to inform people not used to web tools.

The translator student did well in using imperative verbs. It may be not a problem in English, but it can be confusing in French: most verbs in imperative tense sound like the infinitive tense. For example, you pronounce the infinitive "manger" and the imperative "mangez" exactly in the same way.

When I was in secondary school, I had to write instructions for entering a soccer match. I wrote all the instructions in the infinitive tense. My teacher then explained to me it wasn't grammatically wrong, however it sounds too robotic, as if I was talking to machines.

I didn't dare writing in the imperative tense first, because the imperative tense seemed too harsh and not friendly, just like commands or orders, while my audience was other students. My teacher told me it might be one of the uses of the imperative tense, but using the imperative tense here is more appealing.

To show you an example in English, it would look like something like that:

• To create your team.
• To write the team members' names in the form.
• To send the form to Mr. XXXX.

Weird, isn't it? But as I said it before, while in English, it's obvious that something is wrong, it's not so easy to notice that in French, especially as it's not incorrect at all. Indeed, French recipes are written with the infinitive tense.

When writing instructions, while a language uses a specific tense for them, another language may need another tense to make sense. The writer must be careful not to offend or to neglect their audience.