> Even the default example of "Hello, how are you?" from English to French yields an awfully wrong result ("Hello, what is your experience?")...

Really? For me that gives "Bonjour, comment êtes-vous?" with the default settings.

> text generation output

Yeah, text generation is really something that requires a big model. The Llama 7B param model quantized to 4bit is 13G and that is the smallest model I'd actually attempt to use for unconstrained text generation.