Breakdown of Est-ce que nous devons choisir le lauréat parmi ces croquis, dont beaucoup ignorent l'accessibilité ?
nous
we / us (object pronoun)
ce
this (before a noun)
est-ce que
is it that / do / does (question marker)
beaucoup
a lot, much
Questions & Answers about Est-ce que nous devons choisir le lauréat parmi ces croquis, dont beaucoup ignorent l'accessibilité ?
How does dont beaucoup work here to mean "many of which"?
When talking about a subset of a group you just mentioned, French uses dont followed by the quantity word, such as beaucoup, plusieurs, or a number. Because dont already means "of which" or "of whom", the phrase dont beaucoup literally means "of which many." Here, it replaces the underlying phrase beaucoup de ces croquis.
I thought ignorer meant "to not know." Can it also mean "to ignore"?
Yes, but you have to be careful! While its most common meaning is indeed "to be unaware of" or "to not know," it can also mean "to disregard" or "to deliberately pay no attention to" a rule, fact, or standard. Here, the sketches are disregarding the standards for accessibility.
Does le lauréat mean the winning sketch itself, or the person who drew it?
Le lauréat refers strictly to a person who wins a prize, competition, or award. Even though we are choosing the winner parmi ces croquis (from among these sketches), the sentence implies we are choosing the winning artist based on the sketch they submitted. If we wanted to refer to the winning drawing itself, we would say le croquis gagnant.
Why use parmi instead of entre to say "from" or "among"?