"For plenty of use cases, raw AI translation is now the right call: multiplying your costs by 100 to catch the last few percent of errors isn't rational if you're translating internal documents or product listings," says Jonathan Zimmermann, founder of OKA (Open Knowledge Association), a Swiss non-profit that translates Wikipedia articles into other languages.

"For an encyclopedia it's different. Wikipedia runs on trust. A wrong fact can sit there for years and get cited by journalists and AI systems," he says.

With more than 10,000 published pieces, mostly into Spanish, Portuguese and English, OKA is, Zimmerman says, the single largest contributor of translated articles to the collaborative online encyclopedia.

Which is something it absolutely could not have become without AI.

"Translating 10,000 articles the traditional way would cost millions. In our process, the AI produces the draft, then a human translator checks every sentence," he explains.

But that human input is required less and less.

"The machine output is now good enough that skipping the human entirely has become a serious option, and a real temptation across the industry. Two or three years ago, with tools like DeepL, our translators still rewrote a good chunk of every draft.

"Today the prose often doesn't need fixing at all. So, the question is no longer whether AI translation is good, it clearly is, but whether it's good enough to remove the human," says Zimmermann.

Not yet, translators argue.

Ariella Baltié is a translator and legal expert specialised in translating court documents from English into French.

She was contacted recently by someone who'd already translated his documents with AI, asking her to check them.

"There were two major errors right at the beginning," she said.

The AI had translated "Le demandeur" (the plaintiff) as "the requester". "Totally awkward for legal papers," says Baltié.

When the AI saw "Madame X, épouse Y" (Ms X, wife of Y'), it came up with "Ms X marries Y".

In other words, it mistook a noun for a verb, completely losing the meaning of the phrase.

The consequences of mistranslation in the legal sphere can be serious. In the US, for example, errors in machine-translated asylum applications have led to delays in the release of detainees.