For us, Google was the language of love
He spoke only French. American journalist Mac McClelland spoke English. Then Translate came to their rescue…
WHENpeople ask how my husband, Nico, and I got together, they say, “You met, and then?” “And then,” Nico says, somewhat embarrassed: “Google Translate”.
We met in 2010 at a hotel in Port-auPrince, Haiti, where I was reporting on the aftermath of a devastating earthquake. He, a UN peacekeeper from France who spoke practically no English, and I, an American with equal amounts of French, communicated with a lot of pantomime. But once we’d started “talking”, we stuck close by each other, him leading me across the lobby by the hand at one point. We kissed that night.
I woke up early the next morning to an e-mail from him. “Hey Miss!” Nico’s words, suddenly prolific, greeted me. “How are you? For me, it was a magic evening, magic moment, magic woman.”
Google’s translations are not perfect. In that first missive, Nico complimented me heartily on my “hornbeam”, which for some reason the software was giving him as a synonym for “charm”. And he expressed frustration, at times comically, about not being able to shower me with “lovely words” the night before.
When he stole away to my hotel again a couple of nights later, I knew, thanks to dozens of additional e-mails and text messages sent in the interim, that he was driven there as much by emotion as by desire.
I was no prude, as a sexually active single gal. But as a standing policy, I did not sleep with strangers. I slept with Nico that night because, thanks to those Google-assisted communications, he didn’t feel like one.
And so, the next day, I was gutpunched by the e-mail I received. “I’m glad to have could to see you. It was very sweet and ardour this night. I like the contact with your skin.” But also: “I don’t think I see you again. I don’t think this is a good idea to stay in touch.”
My mouth went dry. My instincts and his ardent transliterations had removed my usual reservations about one-night stands – and look where it had got me. I wrote back, calling him a swear word. He responded immediately. The swear word “in Google Translate is not very good word”, he said, alarmed. “I want see you again, I want talk with you again. It’s not the problem!”
The problem, several subsequent messages made clear, was that he had almost got caught absconding from his unit’s camp, which French soldiers like himself were forbidden to leave except on business. He’d endangered his career and put anyone who’d seen him doing so in an awkward position. He couldn’t come to my hotel again.
Of course, that’s not what “stay in touch” means. Nuance!
With the help of algorithms, no matter how clumsy, what could have been a fleeting hook-up became a long-distance relationship. After I went home to San Francisco and he returned to France, we sent constant e-mails. English was our official language; he was dying to learn it.
Any day we could find the time, we both logged on to a video chat. After smiling at each other and typing our hellos, I would write a topical sentence: I had a meeting at work today. Or: I’m not sure if I want to have kids.
I’d watch his eyes move from one browser window to another on his screen as he copied the sentence from the chat, pasted it into Translate and hit enter. It was the Translate window he responded to, not my face directly, as he read what I had written, saying “ah” or laughing or frowning. Then he would glance at me to repeat whatever face he’d just made, with eye contact this time, before turning back to Translate to type his response in French, get the translation, copy and paste it into the chat window, and hit send. And I would read that. Encore. Répète. We did this for hours at a time, over many months, with translations sometimes so garbled they raised more questions than they answered.
Nico, once: “Be careful, it’s of rhetoric! Lol.” Me: “…?” Nico, another time: “My apartment is a whorehouse.”
That one took us quite a few minutes to figure out. In French, “bordel” does mean “whorehouse”; the expression “C’est un bordel” though, means “It’s a mess.”
Google Translate was still easier than the truly old-fashioned way by a mile – or roughly 10 000km, in this case. Imagine doing what we were doing with a dictionary: flipping the pages for every word, conjugating verbs. Could we have exhaustively pieced together our interactions with phrasebooks? Sure, though we might have been less likely to stick with it.
Despite the modern tools at our disposal, this nascent relationship still didn’t seem practical. Our friends were flummoxed. But our chats kept Nico in my life in a manageable way, somewhat predictable and scheduled.
With each e-mail and chat session, our divide narrowed. Immersed in computergenerated English, Nico started to pick up the language.
Him: “My English is very bad this evening!!! SUCKS! (like this?)” Me: “Your use of ‘sucks’ was perfect.” Him (signing off ): “Stay contact every day every time.”
Seven months after we met in Haiti, we saw each other in person again, in a rendezvous arranged, obviously, over chat and e-mail. He could speak enough for us to have simple conversations over dinner. He knew so much more English than the first time we’d met – all learned from our interactions. All translated by Google.
The process continued, and his English kept improving. A year-and-a-half after chancing into each other at that Port-auPrince hotel, Nico and I moved in together in San Francisco. A few months later, we got married. The more we talked, the more we confirmed that we were as in love as we’d thought from that first, pantomime-heavy interaction. Translations had validated our gut feelings. Since then, our relationship and communication have continued to strengthen.
This year, Google released a newer, faster smartphone app that can translate spoken language and pictures of foreign text. Early reviewers report that there are still a lot of mistakes. But the software is likely to get better with time. Even the older method of translating by typing text into computers was advanced enough to make our union possible. – The Washington Post
Mac McClelland writes about her relationship in her book,