je suis / I am / a pot of jam

[waider]

I just spent ten minutes assembling a reply to someone who'd asked, in French, some questions about code on my website. I hope he gets the general gist of my reply, somewhere in the midst of schoolboy grammar and poorly-recollected vocab.

Comments

[zadcat.livejournal.com]

Nous sommes avec l'orchestre!

[mopti.livejournal.com]

It might be an idea to give them a reply in English as well -- that way, they might be able to run the dodgy bits past somebody

*cough*

[odaiwai.livejournal.com]

It's a pity there isn't some inter-web thingy for translating between languages...

*cough*

Re: *cough*

[waider.livejournal.com]

Having seen the interesting attempt it made at converting his email to English, I was unwilling to work it in the opposite direction lest I cause some sort of international incident.

Re: *cough*

[odaiwai.livejournal.com]

I'd normally write my reply in english and put something like "Machine translation using babelfish" at the end along with the babel'd version, so that the recipient can see what I originally wrote in case of confusion. The tranlation from French shouldn't be too bad though.

There:
Je normalement écrirais ma réponse en anglais et mettrais quelque chose comme la "traduction automatique en utilisant le babelfish" à l'extrémité avec la version de babel'd, de sorte que le destinataire puisse voir ce que j'ai à l'origine écrit en cas de confusion. La traduction du Français ne devrait pas être trop mauvaise cependant.

And Back again:
I normally would write my English answer and would put something like "machine translation by using the babelfish" at the end with the version of babel' D, so that the recipient can see what I in the beginning wrote in the event of confusion. The translation of the French should not be too bad however.

That looks fine to me (not that my French is great), and the reverse translation seems to have kept most of the meaning.

Possibly your correspondent writes poor French? (le leet-speak?!!!une!)

Re: *cough*

[mopti.livejournal.com]

I tried that tool to translate the French law against social exclusion into English, and gave up on it.