Worked example · MFL · Year 9
DCF: Producing → Evaluating and improving digital content
Every error in Text B, named and corrected, plus the clean translation and a secure judgement answer. You can mark a whole set from the first table without reading any French. Show it only after the error log is finished. Passage 6 is correct — pupils who "fix" it have lost the point of the task.
| No. | The machine's English | Error type | What it should say | The French that caused it |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | "Greetings Megan!" | Wrong register | "Hi Megan!" | Salut ! — the informal greeting between friends. "Greetings" is the register of a formal letter, and the rest of the email is chatty |
| 2 | "my class is gone to" | Grammar carried over | "my class went to" | ma classe est allée — French forms this perfect tense with être, so the machine produced "is gone". English has one past tense here: "went" |
| 3 | "the country of Galles" | Grammar carried over (proper noun untranslated) | "Wales" | le pays de Galles — that is simply the French name of the country, not a description of it |
| 4 | "The Monday morning" | Grammar carried over | "On the Monday morning" | Le lundi matin — French keeps the article where English needs a preposition and drops it |
| 5 | "deceived" | False friend | "disappointed" | déçue, from décevoir (to disappoint). "To deceive" is tromper — a completely different accusation |
| 6 | "My exchange partners" | No error | Leave it. It is right. | Mes correspondants — the obvious trap here would be "my correspondents", but the machine avoided it. Marking this wrong is itself an error |
| 7 | "sympathetic" | False friend | "really friendly" or "really nice" | sympathiques — friendly, likeable. "Sympathetic" in English means sorry for you, which would make no sense here |
| 8 | "Actually," | False friend | "At the moment," or "Right now," | Actuellement — currently. "Actually" is en fait. This one is dangerous because the sentence still reads perfectly well in English |
| 9 | "I am working of tear-up-foot" | Literal idiom | "I am working flat out" | je travaille d'arrache-pied — an idiom. Translated word by word it produces English that is not even grammatical |
Evidences criteria 1, 2 and 3: eight errors found, passage 6 defended rather than "corrected", every type named, and every correction backed by the French that caused it.
This is the extension, and it is the most realistic part of the task: in genuine proofreading, nobody numbers the errors for you.
Hi Megan!
My name's Élise and I live in Rennes, in Brittany. Last week my class went to Wales on a school exchange. We visited Caerphilly castle and we had Welsh cakes at the covered market in Cardiff.
On the Monday morning I was a bit disappointed because it rained non-stop. Luckily it was nice in the afternoon and we got to walk along the bay. My exchange partners are really friendly and they taught me a few words of Welsh.
At the moment I'm putting together a presentation about Wales for my English teacher. I have to hand it in by Friday, so I'm working flat out.
Write back soon!
Élise
Evidences criterion 4. Note the small things the error log does not cover: contractions ("My name's", "I'm") because a fourteen-year-old writing to a friend uses them, "had Welsh cakes" rather than "ate", "by Friday" rather than "before Friday", and "words of Welsh" rather than "words in Welsh". Natural English is more than the absence of errors.
Getting most of it right is exactly what makes it risky. A translator is genuinely useful when you need the gist of something — working out what a French web page is about, or checking a single word you have half-forgotten — because there you can afford to be roughly right. It must not be used for anything somebody will read as though you wrote it: an email to a partner school, an exam answer, or anything where the wrong word changes the meaning rather than just the style. "Deceived" instead of "disappointed" turns a rainy morning into an accusation, and nothing in the English sentence warns you.
The test I would use without knowing the language is to read the English on its own and ask whether a real person would say it that way. "I am working of tear-up-foot" fails immediately. "Actually" does not — so for anything that matters you check the suspicious words in a dictionary both ways round: look up the English you were given, and see whether the French word comes back. If it does not, you have found a false friend.
Evidences criterion 5: it gives a usable test — read it aloud, then reverse-check the dictionary — and it explains why the invisible errors are the serious ones.