AI and machine translation

Machine translation is good enough to ship for a large share of interface text and unreliable for the rest, and the difficulty is telling the two apart. A button label translates cleanly. A legal notice, a pun in a headline or a string with three placeholders and a plural does not always.

These articles cover the practical side: which strings to translate automatically, which to send to a reviewer, how placeholders and plural forms survive the round trip, and how to keep usage under control when a project has thousands of keys and a dozen languages.

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Frequently asked questions

Is machine translation good enough for a production app?

For short interface strings in widely used language pairs, usually yes. For marketing copy, legal text and anything where tone or precision matters, treat machine output as a first draft and have a fluent reviewer check it before it is published.

How do I stop machine translation from breaking placeholders?

Protect placeholders such as :name before sending text for translation, then verify that every placeholder from the source string is present in the result. Strings that fail the check should go back for review instead of being saved.

How can I estimate what translating an app will cost?

Count the keys and average characters per string, multiply by the number of target languages, and compare against how your provider meters usage. The translation cost calculator on this site does the arithmetic for you.

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