Some decades ago, automatic translation was only good to make fun of the results and was being bashed.

In the recent years, it has made dramatic progress and has now reached a point where it can be helpful to understand what a foreign language text is about, and it is able to build sentences that are generally understandable and even sometimes accurate.

However, the software behind automatic translation is still far to be able to grasp all the subtleties required to fully understand a written text and to write a text that respect the target language grammar and semantics.

You might then successfully use GT to convert a text written in a foreign language you do not know well (or at all) to English, and you’ll be likely able to fix the inconsistencies and understand most of it.

The opposite, converting an English text to a language you do not fully master, will often produce text that a native target language speaker will need to interpret further to understand what was meant. That means you should never take the translated text as proper target language sentences. That’s not yet achieved outside for simple sentences and if you are lucky. That’s the case with Je cours dans/vers la forêt but there are issues with all the remaining sentences.

1. Why was “la forêt” replaced with “lui” (an indirect object pronoun), instead of “la” (a direct object pronoun), when I see no “à” or “de” before “la forêt”?

Because GT didn’t “understand” that “it” refers to the forest. The correct pronoun should have been elle but another issue is “through” is also missed by GT. “There is the forest” is also probably mistranslated.

Voilà la forêt. Je cours vers elle. (towards)

Voilà la forêt. J’y fait du jogging. (through)

2. Why was “lui” not placed just before the verb, like how we’re taught is the proper placement for object pronouns?

Je lui cours vers is not French, vers needs to be followed by something, just like I believe “towards” cannot end a sentence. You might have written:

J’y cours.

Note that j’y cours means either I run to the forest or I run in the forest. This is the kind of ambiguity machine translation will have more trouble to sort out than human translation. People are much more likely to understand what is meant by looking to the context.

3. Why was “dedans” used, instead of some kind of object pronoun? Is it actually impossible to translate “I ran in it” using an object pronoun?

Je cours dedans is not idiomatic.

4. In English, “Electricity runs through it” keeps the preposition, but in French, it seems that using an object pronoun removes the preposition “vers”. How do I know when to remove the preposition (as in “L’électricité le traverse”) versus when to keep it (as in “Je cours ver lui.”) ?

The sentences are odd. Here are idiomatic sentences:

Voici mon ordinateur.

L’électricité alimente mon ordinateur.

Du courant électrique circule dans mon ordinateur.

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If I understand you correctly, then if I have sentences that I want to learn to say in French (ie because there are grammatical structures that I wan tot learn to use), then using Google Translate to do research/investigation to answer my own question is a bad idea?

No, I won’t say it is necessarily a bad idea. Machine translation has even been successfully used at school by “learning from errors”. You should just take MT with a (big) grain of salt anything suggested by GT and that shouldn’t be your unique learning source. I would also recommend to search words and sentences used in context with using linguee and just plain dictionaries.

It will never “grasp” these subtleties, any more than it grasps even the sentences it can adequately translate now. As you know, GT is designed to be blind to what it’s doing, to be simply a complex, statistically informed lookup service between equivalents with some regard for context. I can’t recommend it any more than a bad dictionary even at this point in its development. A fluent speaker can fill in the gaps. A learner is more likely to be misled.

Yes, a fluent speaker will fill in the gaps, that’s the reason why GT is more useful when used in the foreign language to native language direction than the other way around. About “grasping”, of course computers have no real mind to be able to grasp anything, but moving from a phrase book, then to a statistical model and finally to a neural one are steps that have hugely reduced the lack of quality of what machine translation is able to produce.

1. Why was “la forêt” replaced with “lui” (an indirect object pronoun), instead of “la” (a direct object pronoun), when I see no “à” or “de” before “la forêt”?

Google translate is wrong here. “Je cours vers la forêt” when replacing the noun with a pronoun should be “Je cours vers elle”. GT just did not get that the “it” in your second sentence was refering to “the forest” from the previous one.

But “Je cours vers la forêt” is not even the proper translation for “I run through it” (“courir vers” is to run towards, not through). Good translations for “to run through” would be:

• “courir à travers” (almost literal translation)
• “traverser” (simpler, but looses the notion of running)

With the first translation, you get “Je cours à travers elle” But it really sounds weird, specially right after “Il y a la forêt”. I see two options:

• merging the two sentences into one: “Je cours à travers la forêt”
• just dropping the pronoun, making the object implicit: “Il y a la forêt; Je cours à travers.”. I used a semicolon to make the link between the two sentences more obvious.

The second option can be a bit surprising, but it is a thing. I don’t know the exact rule for when you can drop objects, I just use my feeling as a native to decide.

Otherwise you have the “traverser” option, much silmpler with a pronoun: “Il y a la forêt. Je la traverse”: clean, simple, no surprises.

2. Why was “lui” not placed just before the verb, like how we’re taught is the proper placement for object pronouns?

Because of the “vers”. This is the notion of “complément d’objet direct” (COD) versus “complément d’objet indirect” (COI). I let you check out the rules linked to COD/COI but here are e few examples:

• “Je traverse la forêt” -> “Je la traverse”
• “Je cours vers la maison” -> “Je cours vers elle”
• “Je parle à mon ami” -> “Je lui parle”

3. Why was “dedans” used, instead of some kind of object pronoun? Is it actually impossible to translate “I ran in it” using an object pronoun?

With “dedans” the object is always implicit, as I did with “à travers” where it is optional. You can see “dedans” as a shorthand for “dans [implicit object]”, here “dans la forêt”.

4. In English, “Electricity runs through it” keeps the preposition, but in French, it seems that using an object pronoun removes the preposition “vers”. How do I know when to remove the preposition (as in “L’électricité le traverse”) versus when to keep it (as in “Je cours ver lui.”) ?

The translation of “to run through” is a phrasal verb that can be translated into “traverser”, a “normal” verb, or “passer à travers”, a somewat composite verb.

The translation of “to run towards” is “courir vers” which is a verb with a pronoun (“verbe pronominal”, kind of the French version of a phrasal verb).

So I guess the answer to your question is: you look up the translations, and if the translation you use has a pronoun, you will have a pronoun.

4. In English, "Electricity runs through it" keeps the preposition, but in French, it seems that using an object pronoun removes the preposition "vers". How do I know when to remove the preposition (as in "L’électricité le traverse") versus when to keep it (as in "Je cours ver lui.") ?

Part of the problem you’re running into here is a fundamental difference in the way French and English encode directional information and method of movement.

English verbs typically indicate the way you move (to run, to crawl, to tiptoe) and the direction of the movement is indicated by an adverb or prepositional phrase (to run down/up the stairs, to crawl through/along the lawn, to tiptoe into/out of the room).

French does the exact opposite: the verb will indicate the direction of the movement, while the manner will be left to an adjunct, or forgotten about entirely as irrelevant:

To run down the stairs: descendre les escaliers (en courant)

To run down the stairs: monter les escaliers (en courant)

To crawl throughthe lawn: traverser la pelouse (en rampant)

To crawl along the lawn: longer la pelouse (en rampant)

To tiptoe into the room: Rentrer dans la pièce (sur la pointe des pieds)

To tiptoe out of the room: Sortir de la pièce (sur la pointe des pieds)

Of course both languages can form untypical sentences: "Le serpent rampe à travers la pelouse" is grammatical, but it’s about as idiomatic as "The snake crosses the lawn crawling".

Another related difficulty is that the basic French locative prepositions tend to be underspecified compared to English’s because the verbs is generally enough to disambiguate. (For example de will often translate from, off and out of).