'aurons fait les poussières'

Question

In this example --

Après que nous aurons fait les poussières, nous passerons la serpillière partout.
Trans: After we have dusted, we will mop everywhere.

The translation of 'aurons fait les poussières' should be 'after we will have dusted', no?
'After we have dusted' would be 'Après que nous avons fait les poussières', is that right?
Or is the 'Après que' significant for the verb conjugation?

Cécile Janty-Davies · Accepted Answer

This is a very interesting question, Isabelle, and not easy to answer.
For some reason, English speakers do not like using the future perfect; this is true of the UK and the USA, and maybe in Australia?
This is something I have noticed myself in my own experience of watching the news or listening to politicians on TV, whereas French speakers adhere to the rules of grammar, and in particular, what we call concordance des temps much more rigidly, and these would be mistakes in our language.
Concordance des Temps
Although the literal translation -
"After we will have done the dusting, we will mop everywhere."
is grammatically possible and technically the most faithful rendering, it sounds unnatural and stilted to a native English ear.
You might see it in a legal document or very formal technical writing, but in everyday speech, it would raise eyebrows.
Hope this helps!

Alan Graham · Answer

I don't think English speakers dislike using the future perfect; we just don't use it here, as explained in this lesson:

Quand/lorsque/après que/une fois que + future perfect (Le Futur Antérieur) = When/after I've done something in the future (Sequence of Tenses in French)

Similarly, we don't mind using the future tense, but we don't use it after "when" as explained here:

Quand/pendant que + future tense (Le Futur Simple) - not the present tense = When/while I do something in the future (Sequence of Tenses in French)

In my opinion, "After we will have done the dusting, we will mop everywhere." would be ungrammatical in English. Do you have an example of its use in legal documents?

This is not really something that needs to be explained, you just have to be aware that the two languages are different. But perhaps it may be explained by the differences in the way the future tenses are formed. In French, the future tense is just a conjugation, but in English we use the modal word "will", which introduces some nuances in meaning. It would be interesting, perhaps, to compare other romance and Germanic languages. (Similarly, the split between futur and futur proche in French, does not always map exactly to the will do/going to do split in English.)