I will make an aside in English about Google Translate and its accuracy. It surprised me when Margreet and Enoch thought that I must be Dutch, because my expectations about Google Translate were pretty low. A while back, I read an article about artificial intelligence, and one of the stories was pretty much in line with my expectations for machine translation:
Google’s “Translate” system usually does a decent job at translating between languages. But in 2018 researchers noticed that, when asked to translate 18 repetitions of the word “dog” into Yoruba (a language spoken in parts of Nigeria and Benin) and then back into English, it came up with the following: “Doomsday Clock is at three minutes to twelve. We are experiencing characters and dramatic developments in the world, which indicate that we are increasingly approaching the end times and Jesus’ return.”
So, when I created this challenge using Google Translate, I expected the resulting "Dutch" to be pretty clumsy, but I was hoping that at least enough of the meaning would come through for Dutch speakers to be able to understand what I was asking them to do. (If you want to see the original wording, I essentially took the opening messages from the Quest for Great-Grandparents: Literary Edition challenge and edited them to suit. [I did have to take some out of the first message and move it to the second message because I hit the message size limit.])
And, in the same way, for the profiles I created in Dutch, I thought that real Dutch speakers would come along, think, "Wow, this biography is really poorly worded!" and edit them to put them into proper Dutch. (And, just to make it clear, I would not be at all offended if you did.)
Last night, I was using Google Translate to show the light of my life and the delight of my eyes some of your comments and my last reply in this comment stream. I don't keep my original English comments after translating them, so I had to translate even my comment so she could see it, and there were some differences between the back-translation and my original message.
I wrote, "If my experience in Amsterdam is anything to go by, I'm sure you are all perfectly capable of communicating in English if needed. I just don't think you should need to in this case." But the back-translation says, "If my experience in Amsterdam is anything to go by, I'm sure you are all perfectly capable of communicating in English if needed. I just don't think you should in this case." I'm not comfortable with that difference, because to me, it implies that I'm telling you to use Dutch (as if I had the authority to tell anybody what to do!), rather than saying that I think everybody should be free to use whatever language they want.
Then, in the third paragraph, the back-translation uses "stupid" where I had written "silly". I don't know what Dutch word Google Translate used, but I was going more for the intent of saying that forcing people to use English to discuss a different country (especially people from that country) would be ridiculous or absurd, rather than saying that anybody who makes different choices than I do is a stupid person.
Then, in the next paragraph, where I had written, "how my hair looks", the back translation says "whether my hair looks beautiful", which just made me laugh. (If you had ever seen my hair, you'd laugh, too. Or at least smirk.)
So, even though I plan to continue using Google Translate in challenges for non-English speaking countries, do please bear in mind that the beautiful Dutch you're reading might not quite convey the exact meaning that I intend. I might actually just have written "dog" 18 times.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled language.