present perfect continuous

[Ksenia]

Over 1.000 employees have been working at ABC so far and this number grows continually.

Is it possible to use present perfect continuous with "so far"?

Thank you.

 

[emsr2d2]

Your sentence is ungrammatical and it is unclear what you are trying to say. Do you mean that 1000 employees are currently working at ABC, or do you mean that since its inception, ABC has employed a total of 1000 people (not necessarily at the same time)?

 

[Ksenia]

I mean that since its inception, ABC has employed a total of 1000 people (not necessarily at the same time) and it keeps on employing new people. That's why I say that they (employees) are continuously grow in number.
How will my sentence sound then?

 

[emsr2d2]

To date, 1000 people have worked at ABC and that number continues to rise.
Since [date of inception], ABC has employed 1000 people and employment levels continue to rise.

I have tried to give two alternatives for your sentence. There's a potential ambiguity in the conclusion we might make from the figures. Just because they continue to employ more people, that doesn't mean that the total number of people working there at any one time is going up. Let's say the company was recently set up and they immediately employed 500 people to work there. Yesterday, 20 people resigned and 20 new people started work there. The total number of current employees hasn't changed (500) but you can now say that since its inception, the company has employed 520 people.

 

[Ksenia]

emsr2d2, thank you for the detailed answer.

I have one more question: If I want to indicate a certain number of people or size of a territory, should I use dot marks (.) in these figures?
For example: It offers over 25(.)000 items for trucks, trailers, semitrailers and sells its products to more than 1(.)000 customers in more than 30 countries.

 

[emsr2d2]

No. Use either a comma or nothing.

I have 25,000 trucks for sale.
There are 1000 customers on our database.

I prefer the version with the comma, especially with bigger numbers.

1,000
10,000
110,000,000

 

[teechar]

Is it possible to use present perfect continuous with "so far"?

Yes, it is; but not in the sentence in the original post.

For example,
I adopted a cat last month. So far, I've been feeding her leftovers, and she seems happy enough with that.

 

[Ksenia]

emsr2d2, if I am writing different amounts of money, how then I should use dots and commas?

They transferred to our account 12.875,46 EUR.
Have you received the money of 1.928,37 EUR?

Is that correct?

 

[emsr2d2]

emsr2d2, if I am writing different amounts of money, how then I should use dots and commas?

They transferred to our account 12.875,46 EUR.
Have you received the money of 1.928,37 EUR.

Is that correct?

They transferred €12,875.46 to our account. (That's twelve thousand, eight hundred and seventy-five Euros, and forty-six cents. I don't know if that's what you meant.)
Have you received the €1,928.37? (That's one thousand, nine hundred and twenty-eight Euros, and thirty-seven cents. I don't know if that's what you mean.)

We put the symbol for the currency before the numbers (£12, €45, $212). However, that's not necessarily the case in the whole of Europe. The reason that most British people put the symbol first is because that's what we do with our own currency. I understand that in Germany, they tend to put the € symbol after the numbers because they follow the old system where they would have written "12 DM" (Deutschmarks).

For British currency, put a dot between pounds and pence (£1.12). For European currency (Euros), put a comma between the Euros and the cents (€45,66).

 

[GoesStation]

I think you should follow English-language practice when writing numbers in English: use commas to separate groups of three digits left of the decimal, use a period (full stop) as the decimal mark, and put the currency symbol to the left of the number, without a space.

For example, €23,456.78.

 

[Ksenia]

Thank you all!

Numbers are an integral part of my job. I have to deal with them every day in bussines correspondence (Europe). I see different variants of number writing.
For example, €23,981.75 and €24.981,75.
My director says to me to use the second variant of writing.
Won't that be a mistake?

 

[GoesStation]

If you're writing in English you should follow English-language norms: €23,981.75. If you're writing in French, follow French-language norms: 24.981,75 €. If you're in Switzerland, you seem to have a lot of options.

If your director insists on doing it wrong, though, you don't have much of a choice.

 

[bubbha]

Yes, I agree: if you are writing in English, use English numbering conventions. Use commas as thousands-separators and a dot as a decimal point; also, put the currency symbol to the left of the number, with no space between the symbol and the number.

€23,981.75
£1,645,441.12
$1,352.33

If specifying a currency, I prefer doing the following:

US$3.00
NZ$45.25
NT$563