Hello Sarah, what time is it?
it translates to
Bonjour Sarah, quelle heure est-il ?
Now if I change the input to
Hello Sara, what time is it?
it translates instead to:
Quelle heure est-il ?
Any idea why the one character difference in the name affects the translation in this way?
"Hello Sarah, what time is it?"
<Hello><_Sarah><,><_what><_time><_is><_it><?>
Then the tokens are used for inference with a Transformer net. There are no guarantees that output will be consistent to even small changes in the input. The network, based on the data it was trained on/luck, has slightly different connections for the <_Sara> token than for the <_Sarah> token leading to different output.
Here's a video of some Linux YouTubers reviewing Argos Translate (https://github.com/argosopentech/argos-translate), the underlying translation library, and getting unexpected outputs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=geMs9dxl1N8
More verb tenses in French than in English means ambiguity in where things may come from and go to.