Why AI Alone Can’t Translate All Your Content Accurately

AI-translation promises speed and cost savings at a scale human translators can’t match. But what about quality?

Not All Content Is the Same

Different content types require different translation approaches. 

• Marketing: Marketing copy must resonate emotionally and culturally with target audiences—something AI often fails to capture.
• Legal: Legal texts require absolute accuracy. Mistranslation could cause financial or regulatory consequences.
• Technical: Technical manuals need clarity and consistency that AI may not deliver if terminology isn't tightly controlled.
• Medical: Medical information needs to be accurately translated, otherwise, it might harm patients.

Human-in-the-Loop Improves Output 

As a localization manager, you might be looking to decrease time to market, so speed is the most important factor when deploying AI to generate translations. Or if you are under financial pressure, you might want to decrease your costs. Or you might like to get more content translated into more languages within the same budget. So, yes, using AI will help you translate more for less, faster.  But AI alone can't translate all your content accurately. So, how do you ensure the quality of AI-generated translations?

• For high-impact content—especially anything customer-facing—human review is essential to ensure accuracy and brand integrity.
• If you have decided to deploy AI to translate technical documentation or content for regulated industries, a linguistic review by professionals before publishing your AI-generated content is necessary.
• Creative content presents the most significant challenge, particularly for your website, as mistranslations can result in misunderstandings or even public criticism.  Since AI often has difficulty with metaphor, tone, and cultural nuances—key components of storytelling and brand voice—engaging a human translator in the process is crucial to ensure cultural relevance.

Professional Language Services Adds Value to AI-Generated Translations

If you're generating translations for your company,  using your own choice of AI technology,  partnering with a professional Language Service Provider (LSP) like SimulTrans can significantly elevate the final quality of your AI content. A trusted language supplier provides critical linguistic services such as:

• Post-editing by professional linguists: Human experts review and refine AI-generated translations to ensure accuracy, fluency, and alignment with brand tone.

• Terminology management: Linguists generate translations consistent with your industry and brand.  

• Linguistic quality assurance: Human QA specialists utilize advanced LQA tools to assess AI-generated translations, identifying objective errors and pinpointing areas for improvement.

• Localization services: Reviewers adapt the AI-translated content to the cultural norms, idioms, and preferences of the local audience.

• Content type matching: Localization engineers recommend the best combination of AI and human involvement depending on whether the content is legal, creative, technical, or marketing-focused.

• Workflow integration: Localization project managers seamlessly incorporate human review into the localization workflow, maximizing speed without sacrificing quality.

At SimulTrans, we embrace the efficiency of AI while emphasizing the critical role of expert linguists. AI translations are QA'ed, post-edited, and refined by skilled human translators to ensure they meet the highest standards before publication.

If you are interested in this topic, we have another great article on the limitations of language models in other languages.

Let's chat about your own requirements to customize a solution for you.