My most popular message to date on LinkedIn mentioned the problem of working on AI generated translations: it is very exhausting, and the main problem is that it takes more time than the managers seem to think.

I’m not the first translator who says that an AI generated target sentence often has to be rebuild from scratch. Not only because of mistakes, but primarily because the mistakes are spread in such an odd way in the sentence, that it costs more time to stick to correcting the mistakes in the sentence, than to translate from scratch.

If you take the AI translation as a base to work from, you have to read and reread the source and compare it again and again with the target, because the content of the original can be ordered completely different in the target. If the translator wouldn’t do that, the result could be difficult to read, and wouldn’t even sound as the target language. Hence the extra work.

It’s one of the major disappointments about AI translations. I think we’ve hit the limit of gain in time that automation can give us.

donderdag 2 april – vrijdag 10 april 2026