I’m not complaining — I’m rather impressed by how good Google Translate is at parsing hand-lettered comics (even Annie Goetzinger’s handwriting). But one thing is curiously doesn’t know how parse is hyphens:
So it’s “ses antécédents familiaux”, i.e., “his family background”, and not “his family teeth”. (“Dents” means “teeth”.)
I’m learning French, and I can basically understand almost all of that, but I sit with an Ipad Mini with live French->English translation up, so I can efficiently wave it in front of a speech bubble to check words I don’t understand, which in this case was “en revanche” (“on the other hand”).
I’ve got the Ipad strapped to my hand…
… so I can just whip it out.
It works surprisingly well — in cases like this where it doesn’t understand hyphens, so it’s wrong about the rest of the sentence, which I think means “I don’t know anything about his family background”.
Oh, and it also doesn’t understand hand-lettered “ç”, which is unfortunate, since “ça” is such a common word…
(Google Translate on a modern Iphone sucks — it doesn’t know how to switch to the macro camera, so you can only focus if it’s far from the page. Which makes it unusable.)
Anyway — Google people, you’re doing good work, but it could be better! Don’t ignore the super important market consisting of people reading comics in languages they don’t understand! I’m sure there’s dozens and dozens of us! Worldwide!