My French "Papa," who's apparently 90 now (I knew he'd been approaching 90, but I guess it happened), sent me an emailed reply to an email I'd sent him, in French, last Christmas. To my shock, his email was in perfect English. A second later, I shook myself and realized this had to have been an AI translation, but by whom? Did Papa run his message through a translator before sending the email? Does he think my French is so bad that it'd be better for me to have a translated version of his correspondence? I was a little hurt at first, especially after years of talking with and writing to him in nothing but French. So I stewed on this problem all of yesterday afternoon and evening.
Then I thought to check email on my phone, and my finger floated down to Papa's email.
It was in the original French.
So—on my phone: in French. On my desktop: in English.
My conclusion is that Gmail has, for whatever reason, started to auto-translate my emails to English, which I'd long ago listed as my default language. I'm now in the process of trying to undo whatever setting it is that clicked over, without my permission, to auto-translate my emails. I guess a lot of people would see auto-translation as a convenience, but I see this as yet another instance of Google trying to do my thinking for me. Finding an answer to my question has been a pain in the ass. I've asked AI for help, but it's spitting out the usual gobbledygook, leading me to look for settings that don't exist.
An awkward solution—but not a permanent one—has been to reset my language preferences to French from France. This means my Gmail screen is now all in French, which is fine since I can read it, but not really the solution I was looking for.
Ah—I may have found a better solution: I switched Gmail's default language to French French, then back US English. Papa's email is now in the original French and not being auto-translated. I don't know what the hell all of that was about, but I at least now have a sort-of solution that I can implement au cas où.
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