If you’re commissioning a translation, you absolutely want it to be as accurate as possible. That goes without saying.

But why?

It’s because you believe in the content you’re having translated. You expect it to produce results. And you hope that once it’s translated into another language, it will produce the same results with a whole new audience.

That’s how you open up new markets, after all. You go where the people are, and you speak to them in a way they find convincing.

So yes, accuracy is important—but in the end, you’re looking for an outcome.

Sometimes, cost is the most important factor. Some companies are satisfied with the outcomes they’re seeing with computer-translated copy.

Even though they have problems with accuracy sometimes, generative AI tools like ChatGPT are fast and cheap. That may be very tempting. And for simple translations that aren’t mission-critical, they may actually produce pretty decent results.

If you’re a high-volume retailer competing on price, for example, maybe “decent” is good enough. Maybe commissioning professional translations of all your copy would send you over budget. Your desired outcome means you need to keep costs low and speed high, and it might be acceptable to compromise on some details.

But maybe, the outcome you want comes from showing that your business is excellent.

If you want to demonstrate expertise, refinement, and quality, nothing beats a trained, experienced human professional.

That’s where I come in.

With over two decades of professional journalism, copywriting, content writing, and editing experience, I know how words work. I know how to build a sentence, construct a paragraph, and bring together a text so that people want to keep reading.

That skill is just as important when I’m translating a text from a different language. I have to make sure the English version keeps people reading.

It’s trickier than it might seem. Grammar is complicated, even just in one language—and it doesn’t match up from language to language. When you’re translating, following French or German sentence structure down to the last comma is almost always the wrong choice.

Also, people from different cultures expect different things. Even between the UK and the USA, the same kind of document might be written two completely different ways. Why? Because British and American readers are used to different levels of formality, use of technical language, and styles.

A good linguist can take the original content, shape it in the target language, make the intended readers feel at home, and keep all the relevant detail without adding in anything unwanted.

It’s about accurate translation of both meaning and context. The translation should say the same thing, and the reader shouldn’t even notice that it wasn’t originally in English.

A generative AI tool can only go so far. Sooner or later, it will make mistakes, and—this is the important part—it doesn’t know or care. Only a person can do that.