Anybody who learned French at school knows all about the accents. But at school you use a good old fashioned pen, so accents are no problem. But have you tried typing them in MS Word, on an English language keyboard? You have to hunt for the individual letter with its accent under “symbols” which takes, to use an understatement, time.
Naturally the French don’t want to do that, and they don’t have to. They have a totally different keyboard, so that accents are as easy as pie. The logic of the layout is, I suppose, the same as the QWERTY keyboard that we all use, which means that the commonest French letters are in the centre. In brief, it’s totally different, and takes a lot of getting used to.
Those of us who don’t have French keyboards have quite a struggle. The first is, of course, to know what to write in French – i.e. get the words right. That can be very intimidating. Mistakes in spoken language are quickly overlooked, and one is given the benefit of the doubt (“maybe I misheard”), as well as admired for even trying. But committing these mistakes to the cold hard page is very different. The worst thing is that it looks childish, which immediately gives the reader a sense of superiority. Within the office this doesn’t matter much, though let no one assume that there isn’t competition and an intellectual pecking order which is greatly influenced by the written French. But if the same letter is sent to someone in the Government or other person in authority this is not necessarily the relationship that you want.
The situation is worse with emails. Most systems designed for the American market allow you to change fonts, use bold, italic or even more fancy variations, but no accents.
In a way this is an advantage, because it is easy to put accents in the wrong place, or forget them altogether, or use the wrong one. So if one has the excuse that the system wouldn’t let you add accents, that can be quite handy. Indeed, it can save quite a lot of time burrowing in the dictionary.
It was about three weeks ago when an email from one of the staff arrived which was written in a style considerably more florid than her typical I’ll-use-the-minimum-number-of-words-because-that-way-I-run-the-risk-of-making-less-mistakes style. But, above all, it had accents. Lots of them, in all the right places.
I’m not in any position to say I recognise the style of a French speaker, but in spite of its apparent fluency the language somehow did not ring quite true. It was sort of French in drag: with all the outside attributes, but somehow not quite right underneath.
But to criticise it for that would be very mean, and I immediately resolved to start competing. This was now serious: the stakes had been raised and if she could do it, so could I. Before sending anything, I checked every sentence for tense, gender of words, agreement of the verbs with the subject and so on. It was painstakingly slow work. And even then I knew that there would be fundamental mistakes which would be glaring to anyone who knew the language, but which had I had totally missed. And, for fear of making mistakes, I too kept the wording to the simple minimum. The end result: I’ve no doubt it looked like the translation of an English communication into French, not a communication in French.
I don’t remember how I heard it, or maybe I just spotted it on a Google page, but there it was. Translate anything from any language into another. Done instantly, free of charge, by Google. They call it Google Translate. You simply type your words or phrases into a box and the translation appears underneath. You can use it for whole documents – just download them on line, then copy them back into your file. Easy peasy. And, of course, you get all the accents in the right place, absolutely free of charge. So before you write you email, you simply type the text into Google, and voilà: paste it into your message.
As soon as I had discovered this I was quite excited, but you’ve got to be very careful. Some of the translations are a complete joke. I recall using something similar in Google to translate French web pages into English about two years ago. At that time the results were truly ridiculous, not unlike the silly notices you find in Chinese hotels. Presumably someone in Google found out about that and they have put a lot more time into it since.
But it's not perfect by any means. How about this for a breathtaking error? I recently had a lot of meeting transcripts to translate and took the lazy - Google Translate - way out. Here is an example of the results:
Original: Il dit non. (He said no)
Translation: He said yes.
This wasn't a quirk that happened once because of some intangible digital virus: most times "non" was translated as "yes".
My new year’s resolution: to be at least as good, if not better than Google by July.
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