Education and specialised fields
Translation and localisation professional
The problem
AI proposes legal terms that sound right in the target language but are not the ones the terminology source or the client's glossary gives. In a contract, such a term slips through and takes legal effect.
30 courses · 5 specific to this profession
A process from your work
How long does it take you to translate a short business text?
- Step 1The tool produces a first translation of the original.
- Step 2Before delivery, you revise it against the original and the client's glossary.
- Step 3The translation you deliver is yours: you answer for it.
- Where the tool goes wrongThe translation drops the negating prefix, so non-payment becomes payment.
- The verification stepMark every negation in the original and find its matching negation in the translation.
More: what was measured and the full check
What changed, as measured
With access to an AI model, the time per translation task fell from 600.7 to 413.8 seconds, 31.1% less.
Who was measured: Professional freelance translators, randomised to translate short business, academic and literary texts with or without an AI model.
The caveat: Short tasks of about ten minutes each, not full professional commissions; a working paper.
The check, step by step
- Before revising, mark every negation in the original: the words “nuk”, “s'”, “mos”, “pa” and words with the prefixes “mos-” or “pa-”, such as “mospagim”.
- For each mark, find the matching negation in the translation ("not", "no", "non-", "un-", "failure to", "without"). A mark with no match is treated as an error until shown otherwise.
- For each conditional clause ("in the event of", "if", "unless"), say in one Albanian sentence who gets which right and when, and compare it with the original.
- Keep a client glossary of recurring negated words, such as “mospagim”: "non-payment", and search the translation for all of them before delivery.
The course covers a translator's daily workflow with AI: post-editing, glossaries, translation memory and quality checks.
We can help you with this process: “Translation and localisation AI: Workflow”, 8 hours.
A documented failure pattern
A lease clause where non-payment became payment
A translator receives an Albanian lease contract from a client, to be translated into English for a foreign party. To save time, the translator first runs the text through an AI translation tool and then revises the result.
Source: arXiv, 2021, and 3 more.
Why it is easy to miss
In Albanian, negation is often not a separate word but a prefix inside the noun: “mospagim” (non-payment), “mospërmbushje” (non-performance). The tool turned “mospagimi” into "payment" and dropped the prefix. The English sentence is grammatical and uses the right legal words: "landlord", "due date", "terminate". The "30 days" matches. A reviewer who checks terms and figures finds them all in place, and a reviewer who looks for “nuk” in the original finds nothing to compare. Yet the clause now gives the landlord the right to terminate when the tenant pays on time. Studies of machine translation report this as the most common negation error: the negation simply does not appear in the translation, while the rest of the sentence stays fluent.
Where the failure pattern is documented: Peer-reviewed studies: Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Uppsala University and University of Zurich, 2021), Findings of EMNLP (November 2020), Journal of General Internal Medicine (March 2021), Arab World English Journal for Translation & Literary Studies (February 2023).Sources: arXiv, 2021; Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020, 2020; Journal of General Internal Medicine, 2021; Arab World English Journal for Translation & Literary Studies, 2023.The case above is ours, written for work in Albania; the laws it names were checked against the official text.
What it looks like
The original (Albanian)«Në rast mospagimi të qirasë brenda 30 ditëve nga afati i pagesës, qiradhënësi ka të drejtë ta zgjidhë kontratën.»In English: "In the event of non-payment of the rent within 30 days of the due date, the landlord is entitled to terminate the contract."
The tool's translation«In the event of payment of the rent within 30 days of the due date, the landlord is entitled to terminate the contract.»
Specialist courses for this profession
Courses on translation and localisation, terminology, editing and text-quality checks.
Translation and localisation AI: Orientation
Translation and localisation AI: Workflow
Translation and localisation AI: Documents and communication
Translation and localisation AI: Data and analytics
Translation and localisation AI: Quality and evaluation
What you leave with
The term table records, for every low-confidence or legally weighted term, the three levels of verification, the source opened and the date, and whether the term was kept or sent to the lawyer. It is consulted before any term enters the glossary.
Translation and localisation professional
The catalogue lists all 30 together, with filters for format and time.