I've found that google translate works decently (as far as these automated translations can be expected to work) from/to English, however translating from a dif

I've found that google translate works decently (as far as these automated translations can be expected to work) from/to English, however translating from a different pair of languages the results are often very off in my experience. In particular it seems it has some sort of internal bias, as if it always an english-like intermediary representation. For instance, if you ask google to translate the Portuguese "báculo" into French it gives you "personnel". It's nonsense as far as I can tell, a báculo is a "crosier of a bishop"[1]. So what's going on here? Well if you translate it from PT to EN it gives you "staff" and suddenly it starts making sense, because while staff means "A long, straight, thick wooden rod or stick, especially one used to assist in walking" (which fits báculo) it can also mean "The employees of a business" which is an accurate definition for french "personnel". And I believe that's how you end up with the nonsensical PT -> FR translation. Similarly Google used to be confused by the tu/vous (informal/formal) distinction that exists in many languages but not in English. At some point the portuguese "tu és" would be translated in french by the formal "vous êtes" instead of the informal "tu es". This appears to have been fixed however, I can't reproduce it at the moment. Conjugations don't fare so well however, for instance imperfect past french "je chantais" is translated into portuguese preterite "eu cantei" even though "eu cantava" would make more sense I think. Obviously with such small phrases I can't really be too harsh on google's bad grammar, they're probably not optimizing for that case. [1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/b%C3%A1culo https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/b%C3%A1culo