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Machine translation, human judgment

MT engines are fast and getting better every year. But they still confuse registers, hallucinate terminology, and miss context that any domain expert would catch. Our post-editors know where the machines fail — and fix it before your audience notices.

Light PE vs. Full PE

Unedited

Raw MT

Unedited machine output. Grammatically passable, but full of false cognates, wrong register, and invented terminology. Not suitable for publication.

Accurate

Light post-editing

Corrected for factual errors, mistranslations, and critical terminology. The text is accurate and understandable, though style may vary from human norms.

Publication-ready

Full post-editing

Edited to human-quality standards. Terminology, register, style, and flow all match what a professional translator would produce. Indistinguishable from human translation.

Which tier fits your content

Internal docs, knowledge bases, support tickets → Light PE
Technical manuals, product documentation → Light or Full PE
Marketing, legal, regulatory → Full PE
Brand copy, campaigns, public-facing content → Full PE or human translation

What post-editors catch

False cognates

Words that look similar across languages but mean different things. MT picks the wrong one more often than you'd expect.

Wrong register

MT defaults to neutral tone. A legal brief needs formal language; a marketing email needs conversational. Both get flattened.

Terminology drift

The same term translated three different ways in one document. MT has no memory between segments unless you force it.

Cultural mismatch

Idioms translated literally, humor that falls flat, references that make no sense in the target culture.

ISO 18587 Certified

Our post-editing process follows ISO 18587:2017 — covering post-editor qualifications, defined quality tiers, and documented evaluation criteria. The standard exists because 'just clean up the MT output' is not a process.