Translating English past perfect subjunctive into French

I saw the sentence "J'aurais voulu que tu sois lá" translated into "I wish you had been". I was wondering why the present subjunctive in French is used to translate the past perfect subjunctive in English. I would have thought it would be "tu ais été". Maybe my problem is that I'm not that familiar with the English constructions but "had been" refers to a past unreal event which although it didn't happen is still anterior to the main clause. So why the use of the present in French. I find it all very confusing and would appreciate it if someone could explain the reason the subordinate clause is rendered in the present with a "j'aurais voulu/aimé que-I wish" construction to express past perfect.

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Permalink Reply by Neil Coffey on July 17, 2011 at 6:32pm

The translation seems reasonable.

I think the problem is that you're trying to pick out isolated parts of the sentence and then expect a one-to-one correspondence between those elements in French vs English. But if you take each individual sentence in isolation, it is coherent in that particular language.

It sounds a bit glib, but the reason that "J'aurais voulu..." is expressed in a present tense in English is simply because that's the tense that English speakers use to express the notion. French encodes the 'pastness' in the main clause; English encodes it in the subordinate.

One reason this is possible, and part of the difference in tenses that you see, is that the French "present" subjunctive has the property of being largely "tenseless": "present" is a bit of a misnomer. (But in any case, remember words like "present" are just rough labels: it doesn't mean that every single usage matches that label. If I use a "future" tense to say "John will be there by now", I'm actually making a prediction about an action that took place in the past.)

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EducatorPermalink Reply by stu harris on July 18, 2011 at 5:48pm

There's a definite tendency in English to misuse the future tense. One part of my professional life is making coherent documentation out of computer programmers' notes. I spend a great deal of time correcting sentences like "When you click the OK button, the search results will be displayed." Of course it should be "...are displayed" -- an immediate result does not justify a future tense.

Sorry, slightly off topic but I thought members might find that interesting.

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Permalink Reply by Neil Coffey on July 18, 2011 at 8:59pm

But I still think this is labelling issue. You're calling it "misuse" because people have decided to arbitrarily label something "future tense" and then, because of that label, expect all uses of the tense to conform to that label. There's really little reason for that assumption. If you replace "future tense" by "Tense A" and "present tense" by "Tense B", then the problem that you perceive disappears.

Incidentally, this is quite relevant to French, because one does see statements in French textbooks with nonsense like "French is more logical because it uses the future tense to refer to future events with 'quand'".