Écrivez-vous français?

While looking for a rental house in Provence, we did a lot of emailing back and forth with owners/agents. The house we set our hearts on turned out to have a very nice French agent who does not speak English (she says she's been studying it, but does not feel confident enough to use it with us).

So what were we to do? My French - alas! - is not one of the two human languages I speak interchangeably. :-) I know just about enough to be tongue-tied, b/c I can't recall the proper noun genders or verb declinations. Have you noticed that, too, about your foreign language skills? With me, it goes like this:

When I know precious little about a language, I just throw disjointed words out there and gesture a lot. That's how I express myself in Spanish. And Italian. Really, my hands are quite good at Romance languages.

When I know a lot - well, I know a lot. I can happily talk your ears off.

But it's the dangerous middle that gets me tongue-tied. I know just enough French to feel self-conscious about how much I don't know. Luckily, writing in French is easier than speaking, since you can look things up. But it's also harder, what with those pesky accents and cedillas which you can only type on an English keyboard if you know their ASCII codes and how to use them. Which I don't. And writing correctly is doubly important when you negotiate a contract in French.

Enter Google Translate!

Type your English text on one side, and out comes the French on the other. (Or the Spanish. Or the Latin. Or even the Marathi - whatever that is). The French is pretty weird - some vocabulary choices are clearly off! - but the noun genders and verb declinations are perfect! And so is the spelling.

If you fiddle with the English, you can sometimes force Google Translate to give you more colloquial French. Usually, you have to be explicit with the English pronouns (it has trouble with things like 'we told you this and sent you that' - you have to say 'we told you this and we sent you that'; it also has trouble with 'it'). When nothing else works, I put in my two cents (which is what my French is worth) and replace the output with what I believe is right. Typically, Google does 80% of the job, and I do the rest - and hope for the best.

And so, it was with great pride and joy that I read this in the French agent's last email: "PS: je ne sais pas comment vous faites pour traduire en français vos textes car le français est parfait."

Maybe I should try my hand at Marathi next!