AI website translation: where the draft can ship and where it cannot

Machine translation is strongest on the pages that inform and weakest on the pages that decide: layer a human pass over the surfaces that sell.

Machine translation has reached the point where a full draft of your website, in a second language, takes minutes. That part is settled, and it is a genuine gift. The question that decides whether the translation helps or harms the business is a different one: which of those pages can ship as they are, and which need a human being to read them before a customer does?

The honest answer depends on the surface. On the informative body, the long-tail pages that answer ordinary questions, machine translation is genuinely good, and it keeps improving quietly. Where trust is decided it is weakest, in three predictable places: the headline that flattens into blandness, the idiom that turns literal and now means nothing or something unfortunate, and the legal page whose terms must mean exactly one thing in one language, where a fluent-looking ambiguity becomes a real liability.

So the honest layering is this: an AI draft plus a human pass for the surfaces that sell, and AI alone is acceptable for the informative pages a company can afford to have be ordinary. Not every page is a first impression. The homepage and the page where the buying conversation happens carry the relationship; a help article about a minor feature only needs to be clear. Treating every page as equally precious is how translation projects die in a drawer.

Start the human work at the shortest strings. Translate the navigation and the buttons first, because the shortest strings carry the most trust per word: a button is a promise made in two words, and a menu label that reads strangely makes the whole site feel borrowed. Long paragraphs forgive a machine. Two-word labels do not.

Keep a term list while you work: the product name, the service names, the words you refuse to translate, written down once so that every page spells them the same way. Nothing unmasks a translated site faster than a product name whose spelling changes between pages. And read the legal pages once, in both languages, before they matter, because by the time a dispute reads them, the reading is no longer yours to direct.

We publish this way ourselves: our own site runs an AI draft under a human pass in both directions, and our AI tells you it is AI rather than pretending otherwise. The same honesty applies to the tools: what a translation service promises about quality belongs to its provider's documentation, and what your pages must say belongs to your business and, where the terms are serious, to a translator or counsel you trust. Guidance, not guarantees: let the machine draft, and spend the scarce human attention where trust is decided.