Trying to understand...

[ted howard]

I am a beginner. I am using different language programs and online translators to attempt to learn French, but very often they conflict. Currently, I am trying to understand, why, when I try and translate the phrase, " What is THIS (man, woman, boy, girl) doing?" I get : Que fait cet homme for the man, a translation which includes the conjugated verb faire, but the translations for woman, boy and girl DO NOT include any conjugation of the faire verb at all. They translate as: Quelle est cette femme, Quelle est cette fille, and Quel est ce garcon. How can any of those possibly ask what they are doing if there is NO faire verb conjugation in the phrase? Any explainations would be welcome.

 

Merci!

[ted howard]

Shouldn't it be for a woman: Que fait cette femme?....and for the girl: Que fait cette fille?....and for the boy: Que fait ce garcon?

[Neil Coffey]

Using an on-line translator is a slightly dangerous approach. Remember that computer translation systems don't actually work by breaking the sentence down grammatically. Rather, they use a statistical process. This statistical process can work wonders occasionally. But when it fails, the failure can be disastrous. And it does mean that the phenomenon you mention can occur, where changing a single word or phrase results in a "chaotic" change to the translation.

 

I won't go into the details here, but I wrote an article a couple of years ago that might help give you an idea of the problem: http://www.mt-archive.info/Ezine-2009-Coffey.pdf

 

So the explanation is basically that the MT system is liable to produce nonsense and shouldn't be trusted. In this case, "Que fait cet homme", "Que fait cette femme" would be correct.

[ted howard]

Neil! Thank you very much!...or should I say: "Merci beaucoup!" Are you fluent in French?

[Neil Coffey]

Yes, sorry I should have said -- in the data for that particular article I was looking at Spanish-English, but I am also (arguably primarily!) a French specialist.

[ted howard]

Wow! Great! I hope you will be on here regularly. I always have questions and in researching for an answer I never really feel comfortable that I have arrived at the correct conclusion. I live in a very small town and there is no one fluent here that I can talk to on a regular basis for answers. Are there other sites like this that have fluent speakers willing to help?

[Neil Coffey]

Actually, I maintain this site, so yes I'll be on here regularly! There are other people on here (including a number of native French speakers from different countries) as well who will be very happy to respond to questions.

 

In case you're not familiar with it, this forum is actually a "sister" site to the main French Linguistics site which I maintain: http://www.french-linguistics.co.uk/  I've put together various pages of French phrases, grammar info etc on there that may be helpful.

 

[ted howard]

Neil. Thanks again. I will visit the other site and I appreciate your help this evening. I'm sure I will have more questions soon! This website was a good find for me tonight and it  gives me some hope that I can get the correct answers to my questions.