AI translation has gotten genuinely good. For most everyday business communication, it's now indistinguishable from human work to a casual reader. But "good enough" depends entirely on what you're translating and who's reading it.

When AI is fine on its own

Internal emails, meeting notes, customer support replies in well-resourced language pairs (English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese), product descriptions, social media posts. Anything where a small awkward phrasing won't change a decision.

When you need a human in the loop

Legal contracts, medical instructions, marketing copy where tone is everything, anything translated into a low-resource language, and any text where mistranslation has real consequences (think: dosage instructions, financial disclosures, regulatory filings).

A simple rule of thumb

If you'd be embarrassed for the original author to see the translation — bring in a human. Otherwise, AI is probably fine.

The smart workflow most teams use today: AI does the first pass, a human reviewer cleans up anything that matters. That gets you 80% of the speed savings with most of the quality of human-only translation.