English says: Midland is likely to oppose the bid.
Translate it as it stands and you get Midland est susceptible de s'opposer à l'OPA — technically correct, and not what a French speaker would write. The natural version is Il est probable que Midland s'opposera à l'OPA.
The subject has changed, the construction has changed, the order of elements has been rebuilt. This is modulation through syntax change, where translating means redrawing the architecture of the sentence rather than its vocabulary.
What is syntax change?
Syntax change reorganises the constituents of a sentence without altering what it says. You can move adverbials, invert subject and verb, promote a different element to subject, or replace a personal construction with an impersonal one.
The reason is a deep difference in syntactic economy:
- English marks grammatical function by position. Subject–verb–object is close to inviolable, so word order is not available as a stylistic instrument.
- French marks function by morphology and agreement as well, which frees up order — and French then uses that freedom for rhythm, emphasis and balance.
English compensates for its rigidity elsewhere: with the passive, with intonation, with it-clefts. French compensates for its verbosity with mobility. Most syntactic modulations are just those two systems trading solutions.
Restructuring the main clause
Personal English, impersonal French
Midland is likely to oppose the bid. ↔ Il est probable que Midland s'opposera à l'OPA.
English makes Midland the subject and expresses probability inside the verb phrase (is likely to). French moves probability into an impersonal main clause and pushes the whole event into a subordinate with its own subject and conjugated verb.
The same pattern recurs with a whole family of English constructions:
- He is said to have left. ↔ On dit qu'il est parti. / Il serait parti.
- She is unlikely to accept. ↔ Il est peu probable qu'elle accepte.
- The train is due to arrive at six. ↔ Le train doit arriver à six heures.
- You are supposed to sign here. ↔ Vous êtes censé signer ici. (note the construction: être censé + infinitive, never il est censé que)
A different element becomes the subject
By 2003, according to the latest EITO report, 17% of all sales will be transacted over the Internet. ↔ Selon le dernier rapport en date de l'EITO, l'Internet verra passer 17 % des ventes mondiales d'ici 2003.
Four things changed at once:
- the subject moved from 17% of all sales to l'Internet;
- the English passive became a French active;
- the source is fronted in French, where English had it as a mid-sentence aside;
- the time frame moved from the front of the sentence to the end.
Same information, entirely rebuilt. Note that the French version also swaps the percentage sign convention: a space before the %, where English writes it closed up.
The four major syntactic manipulations
1. Fronting in French, backing in English
English places relative clauses and modifiers after the noun. French readily lifts them out and places them in front, typically as a detached past participle.
Biden, who was recently elected president, declared that… ↔ Récemment élu président, Biden a déclaré que…
The literal Biden, qui a été récemment élu président, a déclaré que… is not wrong; it is heavier, and it delays the main verb by an entire clause — something French prose actively avoids.
The reverse move is just as necessary: a French detached participle at the head of a sentence usually returns to a relative clause or an -ing form in English.
2. Adverbials at the end in English, inserted in French
English prefers its adverbials of place and manner at the end, after the object. French often slips them into the middle of the sentence, where they create a rhythmic pause.
He would often read her love letters, sitting by the window. ↔ Il lisait souvent, assis près de la fenêtre, ses lettres d'amour.
The end position is available in French too, and it is perfectly correct. The insertion is chosen for balance — French dislikes ending a sentence on a long participial trailer when the object is short.
3. Subject–verb inversion in French dialogue
After reported speech, French inverts as a matter of course; English does not.
"Sorry," he said. ↔ « Désolé, répondit-il. »
Dit-il, demanda-t-elle, répondit-il are the norm in written French, and Désolé, il répondit is simply wrong there. English keeps he said; said he survives only as archaism or pastiche.
French also inverts after certain fronted adverbs (Peut-être a-t-il raison, Ainsi va le monde), where English would either keep canonical order or use a different device.
4. Clefting: how French emphasises
This one is missing from most lists and it matters enormously. English can emphasise a word simply by stressing it in speech, and by relying on the passive or on word order in writing. French cannot stress a word that way, so it rebuilds the sentence around it:
- JOHN broke it. ↔ C'est Jean qui l'a cassé.
- I need time, not money. ↔ Ce qu'il me faut, c'est du temps, pas de l'argent.
- I saw the film yesterday. (spoken, topic on the film) ↔ Le film, je l'ai vu hier.
Translating an emphatic English sentence without clefting flattens it: the information survives and the emphasis dies. Conversely, a French cleft should usually not be reproduced word for word in English — it is time that I need is heavy where a simple what I need is time, or plain stress, will do.
Why the two systems differ
English buys clarity with fixed order: position carries function, ambiguity is minimised, and information arrives in a predictable sequence.
French buys rhythm with mobility: morphology carries function, so order becomes available for emphasis, balance and the symmetry of syntactic masses.
Neither is better. They simply pay for the same thing in different currencies.
When to apply these modulations
From English into French:
- turn likely to, said to, believed to into impersonal clauses or a conditional;
- front a modifier as a detached participle when the main verb is being delayed;
- insert adverbials for balance rather than trailing them at the end;
- invert subject and verb in dialogue tags;
- cleft whenever the English relies on emphasis you cannot otherwise reproduce.
From French into English:
- move fronted participles back after the noun, or convert them to -ing forms;
- send inserted adverbials to the end of the clause;
- restore subject–verb order everywhere, dialogue included;
- dissolve clefts into simple sentences, letting stress or the passive do the work;
- give impersonal French constructions a real subject wherever English prefers one.
Conclusion
Syntax change shows that translating is not aligning words but rebuilding a structure. Sometimes a sentence has to be dismantled and reassembled according to the balance rules of the other language before it will sound like anything at all.
English says: Midland is likely to oppose.
French says: Il est probable que Midland s'opposera.
Same forecast, architecture reinvented.