When one translation isn't enough: building konid for real language

I was drafting a work email in French last year — intermediate level, good enough to get through tasks, not good enough to know when I sounded stiff. Google Translate gave me one sentence. No indication of whether it was formal, casual, or somewhere in between. I sent it, got a reply that matched my register exactly, and realized I'd accidentally set the tone for the whole relationship as "overly professional stranger." The problem isn't that translation tools are wrong. It's that they give you