Poll: How often do you notice the source text was AI-generated before being sent to you for translation? Vestluse postitaja: ProZ.com Staff
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This forum topic is for the discussion of the poll question "How often do you notice the source text was AI-generated before being sent to you for translation?".
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When you have some AI tools saying "if you paste the text, you are wondering about, I can help you rewrite it to sound more natural and human" we are going full circle, aren’t we? What a turnaround!
| | | | Lingua 5B 
Bosnia ja Hertsegoviina
Local time: 08:56
inglise - prantsuse
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| I spot it miles away | Aug 16 |
The other day I was a grocery store and there was a marketing leaflet on the counter (about some of their products, promos). I just took a peek, and to my surprise, when I started reading I realized after only a couple od sentences everything had been AI generated, I mean the text. It’s either an AI translation or AI-generated marketing articles. It read so unnatural, weird and stiff. It was a printed brochure. I know marketing people use automation and AI a lot, but I never knew they would ac... See more The other day I was a grocery store and there was a marketing leaflet on the counter (about some of their products, promos). I just took a peek, and to my surprise, when I started reading I realized after only a couple od sentences everything had been AI generated, I mean the text. It’s either an AI translation or AI-generated marketing articles. It read so unnatural, weird and stiff. It was a printed brochure. I know marketing people use automation and AI a lot, but I never knew they would actually print out something like that. I stopped reading after 3 sentences, as it was so disengaging and terrible to read. I’m 100% sure this marketing campaign was funded by their sponsors whose products are in the leaflet, and then they use AI. Food manufacturers always have a big marketing budget, mind you.
These were not short slogans or tag lines, but actually long engagement articles with narrative structure, which made AI sound even much worse.
[Edited at 2026-08-16 12:05 GMT] ▲ Collapse
| | | | Luis M. Sosa
Ecuador
Local time: 01:56
inglise - hispaania
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| Fully agree with Lingua 5B | Aug 21 |
I wonder how many marketing executives at major US and UK brands are aware of the damage that raw machine translation (MT) and AI translation are inflicting to their efforts to expand into foreign markets. How many of these executives are fully bilingual, and how many are just in a hurry to say 'hello' in a specific market?
I have noticed (very, very quickly) a lot of websites are leaving MT and AI translation to their own devices just to avoid penny damage to their bottom line.
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| Almost every day... | Aug 24 |
Almost every day, and in subtitling in particular, which is becoming increasingly concerning to me!
I’ve come across some rather alarming examples of AI-generated source text.
For instance, I’ve seen "He took off his shoes to make silence" translated literally into European Portuguese as "Ele tirou os sapatos para fazer silêncio".
Why not "(Ele) Descalçou-se para não fazer barulho"?
Another one that made me laugh and feel sad at the same time was “Smoky Mountain... See more Almost every day, and in subtitling in particular, which is becoming increasingly concerning to me!
I’ve come across some rather alarming examples of AI-generated source text.
For instance, I’ve seen "He took off his shoes to make silence" translated literally into European Portuguese as "Ele tirou os sapatos para fazer silêncio".
Why not "(Ele) Descalçou-se para não fazer barulho"?
Another one that made me laugh and feel sad at the same time was “Smoky Mountains” being translated into European Portuguese as "Montanhas Fumegantes".
The Smoky Mountains are, of course, a mountain range along the Tennessee–North Carolina border, not "smoking mountains".
And in a police context with only one line in the subtitles, "The police issued an APB" (All-Points Bulletin, an alert issued to law enforcement agencies to help locate a suspect) was simply translated as "A polícia emitiu um APB."
"A polícia emitiu um alerta para localizar o suspeito" would be an acceptable translation.
These are not just stylistic issues. They show how easily literal or context-blind AI output can make its way into translation workflows.
In subtitling, where context, brevity and natural language are crucial, this is particularly worrying.
In my opinion, these are AI-generated texts with no human oversight, and that is what worries me most! ▲ Collapse
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