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“Can AI translate this?”

Increasingly, the answer is yes, but that isn’t necessarily the most important question. AI and machine translation have transformed the translation industry. They can process enormous quantities of text, produce drafts almost instantly and assist professionals with terminology, repetitive content and many other tasks.

However, we must not steer away from the central question:

“Can the resulting translation be trusted for the purpose for which it will be used?”

A robot can generate a grammatically elegant sentence, but that does not mean that it understands the legal function of a clause; it can produce a plausible medical term, but that does not mean that it understands the clinical context; it can translate a technical expression consistently, but that does not mean that it understands what the expression actually refers to.

The issue, therefore, is not simply whether a machine can produce language. It is whether the resulting language preserves the meaning, function and context of the original.

Technology can dramatically increase what is possible, but speed is not the same thing as judgement, and fluent language is not necessarily accurate meaning.