Cannot translate from French to English because it is in English?

[Claudio_González1]

When I ask this message from the obvious French of the text to English:

I receive this message:

[Claudio_González1]

This is the way I tried to compose the above message in IE/Win (and I unintentionally left out the "to be translated"):

When I ask this message to be translated from the obvious French of the text to English:

I recive this message:

Correctly formatted in FF/Mac.

[Claudio_González1]

Obviously, in this thread I am interested in the trasnslation problem. I have reported the composition problem in a separate thread: Inserting images wrecks my messages

[Jacob Bugge]

Claudio,

It may be even worse than you could possibly imagine.

If the first word in the body appears to be English, you are doomed whichever language the rest is written in.

If the (first word of the) Header appears to be English (as in the case in question), you are doomed, whatever the body.

And if the OP has a screen name that appears to be, or start with, an English word, you are doomed, whatever the Header.

[Claudio_González1]

Jacob, thanks for the info; I didn't know any of that. With those severe and not very wise limitations, the translator looks rather useless to me. Time to go back to Google?

[Jacob Bugge]

You are welcome, Claudio.

[John T Smith]

I keep a link to https://translate.google.com/ handy for those times when the forum translate function doesn't work properly, or isn't working at all

[Claudio_González1]

John, I think most of us used Google before this new tool was added, and probably will have to go back to that if the translator has been so intelligently instructed to recognize languages as Jacob explains. Fortunately, at least I have the choice of having questions translated to Spanish when the translator refuses to translate them to English...