Artificial intelligence has become a major topic of conversation across nearly every industry, including translation services. With AI technology becoming increasingly accessible, one question we often hear at Reliable Translations is, “How is AI affecting your business?”
Our answer may surprise you. Not in the way you might think.
Here’s why:
AI Translation: Is It Too Good to Be True?
AI (large language models) look like a shoo-in for translation work. On the surface, the idea that anyone can simply input a document and have it come back completely translated for free within two minutes seems like a huge leap forward for mankind. And if that was the simplicity of the matter, perhaps it would be.
But it’s not.
We already know this. As a translation service provider who specializes in 100% human-generated translations since 2009, we’ve been hired to fix countless botched translations from machine translations, low-quality human translators, and now, AI.
And so, a new sub-market has emerged in the translation world to fix bad translations.
And years of experience have taught us that the hardest, most demanding type of translation work is not specialized fields like a neuroscience journal or archaic marriage documents; it’s bad or simply unprofessional translations.
For starters, to fix a translation correctly and fully, the translator must now work not just with the original document, but with the bad translation side by side. They must then juggle comparing the two documents, adjudicating sentence by sentence if the content is adequate or not (in meaning, context, and tone no less) and then fix it where it needs to be fixed, thus creating a third document.
Fixing a bad and/or unprofessional translation to a full guarantee of quality is twice as much work as simply translating it correctly from the start.
What Customers Should Know About AI-Assisted Translation
THAT is what so many of these hybrid translation agencies don’t want customers to know.
Reliable Translations bypasses all these liabilities and a major potential for headaches and problems by simply doing it right from the very beginning with 100% human-generated translations from a professional translator with a 100% guarantee.
We’ve seen how they lure people in with promises of AI-assisted translations 50% (or more) cheaper and in half the turnaround time, and make it seem as though a translator on the other end will polish it off and make everything ok.
The reality is that many of these so-called agencies don’t have any human translators! They put the translation through a second AI platform and ask another robot to adjudicate whether the first one got it right! Horrible! (This action can make the first translation EVEN WORSE than the original AI translation).
And even those agencies who do employ translators to give these machine translations a final look through can’t genuinely promise accuracy and quality, because that would require the translator meticulously combing through the original and the translation side by side, which takes a long time, longer than simply doing the translation and would eat up their profit.
Why Professional Human Translation Matters
When a client receives a bad translation, correcting it properly requires more than a simple review. A professional translator must carefully compare the original document with the translated version, line by line, to identify errors in meaning, context, and tone. Correcting a flawed translation can ultimately be more time consuming and costly than having the document professionally translated from the beginning.
At Reliable Translations, Inc., we believe the best approach is to get it right the first time with 100% human translation by experienced professional translators.