I owe a few words to readers who do not speak French.

Some pieces are translated into English, or written directly in English, in both cases with the help of LLM assistants and critics, usually Claude and GPT-4 or 5.

Others, which I often find more interesting, are written through repeated back-and-forth exchanges between the two languages. For instance, I begin with a text in French, work up an English version, then translate that back into French and annotate it. This third step produces a new, much longer text, which I then have to render into English again (*).

Either way, it is a long process. I often spend entire nights on it, because everything hinges on nuance.

I also have to factor in the strong influence of user prompts on the LLM's processing context, as well as the model's tendency to overplay the register it detects.

Sometimes I post full translations online, sometimes only fragments. French often resurfaces later in the comments, almost as a whisper. To me, those bracketed remarks are the true center of gravity of the texts.

The title may be in French and the text in English or the other way around.

Some diary entries clearly do not warrant translation, and an automated tool such as DeepL is enough to give a basic sense of the meaning. But it is a semantic engine and does not really perceive tone or nuance.

Other texts, however, seem resistant to translation altogether. That is the case with the piece available here, which exists only in French.

That text began as a playful exploration of the French language. I was so happy to be able to play so freely. Although it has since settled into a more classical form, it still resists when I—or any LLM—try to carry it over into English.

My French is non-idiomatic and liminal, unfortunately very dense but, at least to my ear, sensitive. It moves by intuition and hesitates. My English, by contrast, tends to come out cold, conceptual, and assertive. That gap is sometimes valuable to me. More often, it feels stifling, if not outright discouraging.