When AI Translates: Where Humans Still Matter

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Machine translation has become ubiquitous. Google processes one trillion words monthly through its translation service alone, and competing systems from DeepL, Microsoft, Claude, and others handle additional volumes. The financial market for machine translation reached $1.4 billion in direct sales last year. This scale reflects a genuine achievement: AI systems now produce usable output for many routine tasks, from internal documents to product listings. Yet this success obscures a persistent limitation that researchers and professional translators continue to confront.