What we will not promise
A machine cannot sign a certificate
The honest argument is narrow and it holds. The broad one is false, and it is the one this office would profit from.
What you will see advertised
“AI translation is not accepted and is too inaccurate for official documents.”
That is an advertisement, and it is one this office would profit from. It is also not true, and the rest of this page is about the argument that is left standing when you take it away — which is narrower, which is correct, and which does not weaken as the models improve.
What is actually true, including the part against our own interest
That is not the case and this office will not argue it. Machine translation is often very good and we sell it, with human review, at about half the rate. The real limit is narrower and it is absolute: a certificate of accuracy is a statement by a person who can be named, questioned and held to it, and a model is not a person who can be any of those.
That is not a form of words. On the rate card it is a line called machine translation with human review, at 11 cents a word in group one against 24 cents a word for a legal file done from scratch by a person, and it has its own service page. We sell it, we say when we have used it, and a page arguing for human translation that would not begin by saying so is arguing dishonestly.
What a certificate of accuracy actually asserts
The limit has nothing to do with quality, and the quickest way to see that is to stop reading the translation and read the piece of paper attached to it.
Look at what the certificate actually asserts. Somebody is competent in both languages. Somebody has compared the translation with the original and says it is complete and accurate. Somebody's name is on it, and if that turns out to be false there is a person to answer for it — in a deposition, in a professional complaint, in a claim against an insurer. Every one of those is a fact about a legal person. A model has no legal identity, cannot be sworn, cannot be deposed and cannot be sued, so there is nothing to put in the box the certificate exists to fill. That is a fact about accountability, not about quality, and it does not get better as the models get better.
There are three more that follow from the same place. A state that appoints sworn translators appoints a named individual and holds their appointment; there is no mechanism to appoint software. An interpreter in a proceeding takes an oath, and an oath is something only a person can take. And a document you paste into a consumer service is a document you have disclosed — which for a sealed record, a client's file or somebody else's medical history is a decision that should be taken deliberately rather than in a hurry at eleven at night.
So use it, and know exactly where it stops
Use it for what it is good at, which is a great deal: understanding a document that has arrived, drafting something internal, getting the sense of a long file before deciding which part to have translated properly. When a person has to answer for the result, buy a person. And when a machine draft plus a translator reading every line is the right economics, ask us for that by name — it is on the rate card and it is not a lesser product, it is a different one.
What that line actually is, is one sentence on the rate card: machine output, read end to end and corrected by a translator, quoted by the word like everything else there. Which side of the line a particular document falls on is rarely a hard question — send it, say what it is for, and you will be told which of the two you are better off buying.
The other nine
One argument in ten parts. Each one is a sentence this trade sells and a plainer thing that is true instead.
Send us the document
A photograph is enough to quote from, and you will hear what the problem is — if there is one — before anybody starts work rather than afterwards.