Eef, our resident columnist and contributor of mainly scientific content to this blog, decided it was time to write and publish some short stories collected from his memory under the sub-title ‘Unexpected turns of events‘. It is my pleasure to publish them on this site and bring them to your attention. Eef wrote three stories to date, I have no doubt that more will follow shortly.
Author’s note:
I had several conversations with my AI friend Arty (ChatGPT), some of them in English, some in Dutch, and it seemed to me that Arty’s answers/remarks/explications were noticeably smoother in (US) English.
Around the same time, I saw Paul struggle with the translation of his novel The Big Day into Dutch.
In my (humble) opinion, the powerful English from his original book, deteriorated somewhat into the longer drawn-out sentences in Dutch.
I had ChatGPT also make an attempt to translate some paragraphs, and the result was equally disappointing, the smooth flow was gone.
My preliminary conclusion was, that in English word efficiency is high. A lot of information can be transferred in relatively short phrases.
Other languages, among which Dutch, require more text to achieve the same goal.
That made me decide to write a short English story myself and evaluate how this turns out for me personally. Can it compete with my Dutch skills?
The short story became a bundle of three, due to the common theme which is ‘An unexpected turn of events’.
And the result? Well, let the reader be the judge of this.
Paul did me the great favor of scrutinizing my writings. He intercepted an embarrassing amount of errors and gave suggestions for improvement.
And the clumsy nautical expressions in ’Sailing on the North Sea’? These are all mine of course.