What makes a text feel off, even when it's grammatically correct

Something caught my attention last night, as I was inspecting the automatic translation Google made of my last article into my native French. An early 90s kid, I was raised during the toddler years of the internet, when little existed yet, and most of what did was in English. Back in the early 00s, translations were awkward, to say the least, and nobody would have suspected they would become so good one day, because languages can’t really be translated word for word - they are lived, and interpreted at best.

In fact, this very observation encouraged me to take up languages early on, and I soon found myself browsing the early internet in the very limited English I had back then, just to be able to find actual information rather than weird translations of it. I never used Google to translate any page, because I didn’t really ever need to. But this writing platform allows me to automatically translate my articles into several languages, so I thought: of course, why not let native speakers of other languages read me?

My Spanish is advanced, but not native-like, and I wouldn’t be able to judge the quality of an Italian text, let alone of all the other languages offered, so I could only go mistake-hunting in French. I read each sentence carefully as it unfolded, thinking to myself that I don’t know whether I would have been able to phrase them so accurately, because I have long since lost the habit of writing in my native language. Yes, the sentences unfolded almost suspiciously well: the grammar held, the vocabulary behaved. The text marched forward with suspicious discipline. Nothing jumped out as wrong, or even slightly crooked.

Except… there was, at times, that faint sensation of displacement. Not enough to stop the reading, not strong enough to name immediately. Just a soft awareness that something in the phrasing didn’t quite belong where it had landed. Like guests who followed the instructions on the invitation, but still showed up overdressed. Or in pijamas. Either way. What struck me was that I couldn’t correct them in any obvious way. There was no error to fix, no rule to invoke. The problem, if it even deserves that word, was not one of correctness but of likelihood. These were sentences that could exist, but probably wouldn’t, for some reason.

I was particularly attentive to this because, just an hour earlier, I had gone through a translation task for a gig, where I basically had to provide French equivalents for marketing sentences (what’s called “copywriting'“). I found myself noticing that, although such sentences were easily and directly translatable (a good half of the English vocabulary being derived from French and Latin), that’s just not really how we would say it. We don’t say “des termes et conditions s’appliquent” for “Terms and conditions apply” (notice how transparent the words are). We’d say “Offre soumise à conditions” (“offer subject-literally submitted-to conditions”). The first would be understood, but it would sound unnatural. The fact that these subtleties are well known is the reason why human translators are still (although less and less) in demand. Because industries localizing their content are still aware that machines aren’t (yet) able to interpret messages as well as natives do. What translators are doing right now is helping train the systems on the only thing they can’t figure out themselves, and that will eventually replace them.

I’ve been thinking about this since I got up this morning. We tend to think of language in terms of permission: what is allowed, what is grammatical, what passes inspection. But living languages don’t really operate on permission alone. They run on habit, preference, repetition, avoidance. On things people say because they’ve heard them said a million times before, and on things they never say—not because they’re forbidden, but because no one ever quite reaches for them. I think that’s what I was hearing in my own text: phrases that had arrived by logic rather than by use. They made sense, they were even elegant in places, but they hadn’t passed through the soft filter of everyday speech. They hadn’t been worn down by mouths.

This feeling comes back very clearly when watching dubbed films—which I never do, but sometimes overhear when I’m at someone’s place who doesn’t speak a second language. To me, dubbed movies can’t offer a truly immersive experience, unless we’re talking about cartoons, where voices are performed by expressive actors and the text doesn’t have to fit precisely the movements of the characters’ lips. No - movie voices sound slightly inflated, almost theatrical, yet still oddly flat, with a certain breathiness to them. There’s the sense that everyone is enunciating for a room that doesn’t exist. And then there’s the strange constraint hovering over every line, making it such a hard job for dubbing writers: the need to fit words to mouths, syllables to lips, timing to faces that were never meant to produce those sounds. And Brad Pitt ends up sounding uncanny, his talent as an actor compromised, because what he says—and the way he says it—just isn’t it.

But even if you look past all of that—even if you generously suspend disbelief—the unease persists. What the characters say simply isn’t how people speak. Not because it’s grammatically wrong, but because it’s unfamiliar in a deeper way. The sentences feel imported. You can sense, almost physically, that they began life elsewhere, under different pressures, with a different tolerance for explicitness, for length, for rhythm. They’re sentences that survive translation but lose their social camouflage.

You don’t hear them in real conversations. Not at the table, not in arguments, not in moments where people hesitate or overshare or choose the wrong word and live with it. They sound complete in a way everyday speech rarely is. That’s also why, in my opinion, dialogue and monologues in movies—spoken by actors in their native languages—often feel a little off as well. The lines are just too good. Too impactful. Too witty. Too long, at times. Too… too much. I remember how hard it was for me to understand movies in English without relying on those little wheels that are subtitles. I had passed my C1.2 level long ago and could speak with natives, across accents, with ease. But movies were still difficult to follow. And for the longest time, so couldn’t quite understand why. Until I did. And that was because, beyond the occasional cultural reference I was missing, the scripts were just too intense - for lack of a better word. They felt too performative, too clean, too cookie-cuttered to fit the situation wittily. To this day, even though watching movies has become a walk in the park (on the topic, I wonder how this expression will be translated!), I often think that films are the ultimate boss level of a language. You hear in movies the most intricate sentences that a regular person, with a regular brain, would never come up with in a real-life situation.

But back to our initial topic. What really makes a translated message blur into something oddly translated is what linguistics calls non-idiomatic phrasing. It seems to live exactly there, in that narrow gap between sense and use. It doesn’t announce itself loudly, and it doesn’t even break comprehension. It just carries a quiet accent—technically correct, but phrased in a way a native speaker wouldn’t have chosen. You can smooth, adjust, nudge, but some part of it remains intuitive, resistant to explanation. You end up thinking, it’s correct, but there has to be another way to say it.

Which leaves me wondering—though not conclusively—whether fluency is less about mastering rules and more about intuition carved through intense cultural exposure. And whether mastery in a foreign language is even achievable at all. About absorbing not just structures, but preferences. About learning, slowly but surely, which sentences a language seems to avoid, and trusting that avoidance as much as its rules. I’m not sure what it takes to sound unmistakably natural. But I suspect that this awkwardness, the kind that doesn’t break anything, is where languages reveal what they are most protective of.

And having said that, I’ will (ironically) check my own text for unnatural phrasing before posting it. [Note: a few sentences were very slightly adjusted, which, incidentally, illustrates quite well the point I was trying to make!]