Reply to post: I see your German and I raise you my French

US immigration uses Google Translate to scan people's social media for bad posts – Er, don't do that, says everyone else

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward

I see your German and I raise you my French

Google does indeed have a habit of turning negatives into positives in languages like German or Czech, but that's a limitation of the machine.

On the other hand, in French sometimes the only was to know if a sentence has a positive or a negative meaning is to ask the author to pronounce it.

It can usually, but not always, be inferred from the context but for instance « il y en a plus » means either “there are more” or “there aren't any more [left]”, depending on whether the ‘s‘ is pronounced or silent.

And in the latter case it could mean either “there aren't any more [left]” or “it rained some of that”.

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