I checked in with my UK Expert the other day.

I explained what I had discovered when I used the Translate apps to get the Spanish word for America, that they came back with “Estados Unidos”, and I went through the whole story that I wrote up a few days ago.

What I wanted to know was what do they call this country in the UK?

The answer did not surprise me. “The States,” replied my UK Expert, “or perhaps USA.” 

That jibed with what I suspected. I’ve seen a fair number of British chat shows and I thought I recalled them saying “the States” from time to time.

But both my UK Expert and his Legally Not Blonde wife took exception to something else that I said. I had mentioned that I checked a few European languages, including French, and they all translated America as essentially that language’s word for America.

“Not so,” claimed Mr. and Ms. UK Expert, as they insisted that the French would insist on “Les États-Unis” or something similaire.

I could only point out that that was what the translation apps spit out.

So why the discrepancy?

To the best of my knowledge, both Google Translate and Apple Translate derive their language skills from scraping the web. That is, they scour the web and when they come across a web page that has multiple language versions, they add those to their database. That’s how they “learn” to translate from one language to another.

Now there are how many Spanish speaking countries here in the Western hemisphere? Two dozen? Counting North and South America and the Caribbean Islands. Something like that. And I’ve gathered that those countries might be very sensitive to the idea of “America” being a continent and the “United States” being the name of the country, so perhaps every time “America” shows up in a web page, the Spanish equivalent is always “Estados Unidos”. So the translation apps “learn” that the Spanish word for “America” is “Estados Unidos”.

However, as far as the European languages are concerned, like, say, French, which doesn’t have as strong a presence here in the Western Hemisphere, even though the French people might refer to this country as “Les États-Unis”, when the word “America” shows up on a web page, it might simply be translated into “L’Amérique”.

At least that’s my guess.

But please, please, please! Don’t ask me to pronounce any of those French words!