Me place el informar

[cmon]

Why is el informar used in the following sentence instead of le informar or informarle?

Me place el informar a Ud. que la clase a la que atiende su niño participará en el Programa Nacional de Incentivo.

I am pleased to inform you that the class your child attends will participate in the National Incentive Program.
Also does a la que stand for to which?

[Rusty]

Originally Posted by cmon

Why is el informar used in the following sentence instead of le informar or informarle?

Me place el informar a Ud. que la clase a la que atiende su niño participará en el Programa Nacional de Incentivo.

I am pleased to inform you that the class your child attends will participate in the National Incentive Program.
Also does a la que stand for to which?

The indirect object pronoun le is suffixed to an infinitive in most cases. So, informarle would be correct. But, the sentence in question is using a gerund (a noun derived from a verb).
I wonder if the sentence came from a native speaker.

Me place = it pleases me
el informar = informing (gerund)
a Ud. = you
que la clase = that the class
a la que = which (to that which)
atiende = (wrong verb used here - it should be asiste)
...

Your translation of the sentence is correct, and it also happens to fit this reworded version of the sentence:
Me place informarle a Ud. que la clase a la que asiste ...

[cmon]

Both sentence and translation were found on AboutSpanish.com Spanish Word of the Day. Placer being the featured Word of the Day.
So when el (is it still a definite article?) is placed before an infinitive, that means it's being used as a gerund.
informando/el informar/same difference then?

[Tomisimo]

Almost. In English when you want to use a verb as a noun, you use the gerund (ends in -ing). In Spanish when you want to use a verb as a noun, you use the infinitive preceded by "el".

informing = el informar
walking = el caminar
talking = el hablar
eating = el comer

[CrOtALiTo]

I want to do a commentary about of the cmos's opinion, look you have said, your translation was made in a translate machine, let me telling you something, you must not believe every translate made for a translation machine, because, if you know, the translation machine does not exact the own translation of the phrase or oration, the I give you a hint, you must ask first the question there in the website and we gladly will answer your doubt.

[Rusty]

Nothing was said about a translation machine, Crotalito. A web site contained both the Spanish sentence and the English translation found in post #1 of this thread. We've been trying to help make sense of parts of the Spanish sentence that weren't clear to cmon.

[cmon]

All clear now, thanks everyone!

[CrOtALiTo]

Rusty, then What does AboutSpanish.com mean? that website, if you found the phrase translate in a website then for logical, the translation of the phrase or oration was made for a translate machine, and does not for a person.

[Tomisimo]

Originally Posted by CrOtALiTo

Rusty, then What does AboutSpanish.com mean? that website, if you found the phrase translate in a website then for logical, the translation of the phrase or oration was made for a translate machine, and does not for a person.

Si encuentras una frase y su traducción escritas en una página, ¿por qué dices que por lógica es una traducción automática y no hecha por una persona? En fin, no fue una traducción automática.

[Rusty]

AboutSpanish.com is a Spanish learning site. On that site they list all kinds of sentences, in both languages, to help English-speaking people to learn Spanish.

When someone uses a computer program to translate from one language to another, that is known as using a machine translation.
I doubt the folks at AboutSpanish.com used a machine translation.

To prove that, let's use a few of the best machine translation services to translate the English sentence into Spanish.

Here's the English sentence I will enter at each site:
I am pleased to inform you that the class your child attends will participate in the National Incentive Program.

Here is the machine translation from babelfish.yahoo.com:
Estoy satisfecho informarle que que la clase que su niño atiende participará en el programa incentivo nacional.

Here is the machine translation from freetranslation.com:
Soy complacido para informarle que la clase su niño asiste tomará parte en el Programa Nacional de Estímulo.

Here is the machine translation from translate.google.com:
Me complace informarle de que la clase de su hijo asiste a participar en el Programa Nacional de Incentivos.

As you can see, each of the different computer programs I used produced a pretty bad translation of the English sentence, which I translate as:
Me da placer (me complace) informarle a Ud. que la clase a la que asiste su niño tomará parte en el Programa Nacional de Incentivos.