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Consider the German translations of the following English sentences:

Women are offered screening.

Screening is offered to women.

I would think the translations would be:

Frauen werden Screening angeboten.

Screening wird Frauen angeboten.

If these translations are not correct, please explain.

user44591
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  • I know, the question is about passive voice. But the German translation feels sort of incomplete to me: I wonder, whether Screening can/should be translated as well, and whether or not it would need an article in the translation. What is the context here? Is this about a screening for actors? Or is it about a medical screening to detect certain diseases? Something else maybe? – Arsak Feb 25 '21 at 10:51

1 Answers1

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Let us start with an active construction:

Man bietet Frauen (Dativ) Screening (Akkusativ) an.

Only the accusative object can become the subject of a passive construction:

Screening (Nominativ) wird Frauen (Dativ) angeboten.

However, the word order is flexible as long as "wird" stays in second position and "angeboten" at the end.

Frauen (Dativ) wird Screening (Nominativ) angeboten.

Note that "Screening" is still the subject, so "wird" is still a singular form.

Carsten S
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    Yes, that is clear. But what about, "Women are offered to be screened." Could the translation then be, "Frauen wird angeboten, gescreent zu werden." – user44591 Feb 24 '21 at 17:46
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    @user44591, I am not sure about the English sentence, but the German sentence is correct. What happened here is that the noun "Screening" has been replaced with "gescreent zu werden", which is allowed to go after "angeboten". – Carsten S Feb 24 '21 at 17:52
  • The sentence "Women are offered to be screened" cannot be translated directly into German, because in the active sentence, "Frauen" is dative, and a dative object cannot become the subject in the passive sentence, it stays a dative object. "Frauen wird angeboten, gescreent zu werden." is correct, but "Frauen" is still the dative object, and the sentence has no subject. – RHa Feb 24 '21 at 21:50
  • Word order is flexible: to the extent that Angeboten wird Frauen Screening is a correct sentence. – amadeusamadeus Feb 24 '21 at 22:14
  • @user44591 -- I'm pretty sure "Women are offered to be screened." has a different meaning. Perhaps: "I have 5 women, and I'm offering some of them to be screened (by the TSA maybe)." How to express the meaning in German was explained, but you can't expect every possible wording in English to have a counterpart in German. – RDBury Feb 25 '21 at 03:14
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    "Only the accusative object can become the subject of a passive construction:" This made me wonder what happens when the verb has no accusative object. DeepL gave me Dem Kunden wird geholfen, but this seems wrong. Dem Kunden is dative, but is also the subject (apparently), breaking the "subject is nominative" rule. – RDBury Feb 25 '21 at 03:26
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    @RDBury, your example sentence simply does not have a subject. That this is possible in German has come up here in the past. https://german.stackexchange.com/questions/36686/satz-ohne-subjekt – Carsten S Feb 25 '21 at 08:20
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    In German, it's even possible to have passive sentences which lack both a subject and an object: "Hier wird zu viel geraucht." – RHa Feb 25 '21 at 10:26
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    @Carsten S: That seems to be the consensus, but It's not possible logically for a sentence with a finite verb to not have a subject. The verb is conjugated according to the person and number of the subject, and in order for something to have a person and number it must exist. Otherwise Dem Kunden wirst geholfen or Dem Kunden werde geholfen would also be correct. The subject may be implied, which often happens when the impersonal es is the subject, and I think that's what's going on here. – RDBury Feb 25 '21 at 15:02
  • @RDBury, I am sorry, calling this a logical impossibility is nonsense. Jan (see his answer to the linked question) can have a grammar in which certain sentences do not have a subject and the finite verb takes a third person singular form. You can have a grammar in which the same sentences have the subject "es", which however is not allowed to actually appear in the sentence except in certain word orders. As long as for both of your grammars the same sentences are correct, this is purely a matter of aesthetics. – Carsten S Feb 25 '21 at 17:11
  • @Carsten S: I follow the reasoning but I think it's a matter of interpretation. One way to look at it is that subjectless sentences use the third person singular conjugation. The other way says that the subject is es but it's omitted as implied unless required by the V2 rule. In either point of view the sentences which are accepted are the same, so they are equivalent interpretations of the same phenomena. (Insert comparison with quantum physics here.) But I see now how Dem Kunden wird geholfen is correct under either interpretation. – RDBury Feb 25 '21 at 18:07
  • From my point of view the key here is that dative objects cannot be the subject of a passive sentence in German. This is the key because, for a person who speaks English, this is a new, unfamiliar rule. And it requires the speaker to undergo a 2-step process to translate from English to German. He must first examine the corresponding active sentence to find the accusative object and only then can he conjugate the verb correctly in the passive. Until this incident I was unaware of this difference between English and German. – user44591 Feb 26 '21 at 00:04