This page was translated from Dutch with AI.
Ask your AI how sure it is first
When you have AI translate a text, you almost always get a fluent translation back, and because of that you do not really see if it is actually correct. We talked about that in a workshop when a participant from the aid sector said that she works with languages every day, including languages from the Horn of Africa, where you cannot easily find a colleague to read along. She had never used AI for that, because she thought the knowledge of such a language would be limited. That may well be true, but I told her that you can also just ask your AI about that.
How you ask about the limits of your AI
A language model sounds just as confident in a language it knows well as in a language it has only seen a fraction of. Languages like English or French are on the internet a lot, and Copilot and the other tools translate very well there too. With a language that is online much less, the tone of the answer gives nothing away. So you have to ask about it yourself.
What I do then is that before the translation I ask something like: 'If I give you a text in this language, how sure are you that you will translate it well?' And I add a sentence: 'I want an objective self-evaluation, not marketing.' With that sentence you are actually asking it to look factually at what it can do. Then you get an answer about where its limits lie, instead of a story about how good it is.
What you do with that answer depends on what is at stake. For an informal message to a colleague, a reasonable estimate is enough. If it is about a letter to a client about her guidance, then I would take any doubt from the model seriously and build in a second check. Your AI does not know what is at stake for you.
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