Machine translation & AI quality
How this is scored
What the machine translation does and how well it is controlled: the languages and language pairs covered, the engine (own neural or LLM model, or a choice of third-party engines such as DeepL, Google, Microsoft or an LLM), glossaries and formality applied during translation, document translation that keeps the layout (Word, PowerPoint, PDF, InDesign), custom or adaptive models trained on the customer's own translations, automatic quality estimation or scoring, and published evaluations of translation quality.
0 — No machine translation of any kind, and no way to connect an engine.
3 — Machine translation is offered or one engine can be connected; languages, glossary use and quality controls are basic or not described.
5 — Machine translation for the major European and world languages with the list published, glossaries applied during translation, a formality or tone setting, document translation that keeps formatting for common office formats, and either an own engine or a choice of several named engines.
8 — Custom or adaptive models that learn from the customer's translation memory or corrections, automatic quality estimation per segment with a threshold that routes weak segments to human review, LLM-based translation with style guides and context, engine selection per language pair stated, and a published quality evaluation with its method.
10 — Translation quality that an organisation can measure and steer: evaluations against named benchmarks or blind human review published with their method, quality estimation calibrated and explained, custom models with their training data and isolation documented, and every machine-translated segment traceable to the engine, model version and glossary that produced it.
The In-House Document Translator
The engine list is named (Google Translate, MyMemory, DeepL, OpenAI, Gemini, Mistral, Anthropic, Lara), I can bring my own keys or a self-hosted model endpoint, glossary terms go into every AI request and are checked on every save, and a per-language style guide sets tone and formality. Quality estimation scores every AI translation between 0 and 1 with a stated reason and routes low-confidence output into human review instead of saving it silently — the control I want before a contract leaves the house. What holds it down: only AI output is scored, not plain machine translation; we found no public information on a published quality evaluation; and the vendor's own documentation states the service generally handles keys and values and does not preserve the original file structure, so no Word or PDF document comes back with its layout. 1 7 10 11 14