English to French with Artificial Intelligence and back again

In the last post I showed a little bit of the AI treatment of a forthcoming column of mine for the publication the Duluth Reader. I only noticed two small details that were different from the first short paragraphs I’d sent into the Reader before curiosity submitted them for translation into French by the AI service Deep L.

After uploading the post I decided to do the full articles translation back into English. I know trust Deep L to handle most of my translation but I did notice a great many small changes some of which on the retranslation were not what I would write. For instance, from the French translation back to English the ruby slippers which were stolen but later “returned” were said to have been “reassembled.” I have no reason to believe that the French version was wrong but its “return” to English was bumpy.

I noticed that Honor became the British “honour” but there were other small changes and I took a picture to show my readers what they were:

Also note that I mistakenly put a possessive apostrophe in grandson’s which Deep L correctly removed.

And one more thing about translating back and fourth from French to English. All French nouns are gendered and when described as belonging to some one the pronoun they use when we use he or she not to be trusted in translatin. sa is the feminine like our her and son is the masculine like our him. BUT IF A MAN IN AMERICA OWNS A COW WE SAY HIS COW BECAUSE IT BELONGS TO THE MAN. THE FRENCH SAY SA VACHE BECAUSE COW IS GENDERED FEMALE. Its not her cow its his cow. Its sa vache because as a female gendered word it demands the female pronoun of ownership even though the owner is male. Not only to English and French speakers make this mistake all the time computers make the same mistake. When Deep L translated a yellow haired witch leading her army of monkeys it was wrong. I wrote his. I’m not sure if monkey armies are of the female gender and I don’t think I want to find out.

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