The arrival of these tools changed the economics of a Chinese page for a small European company. What used to require an agency and a fortnight now takes an afternoon, which is a real gain and the reason the question is worth treating seriously rather than dismissing. What has not changed is who reads the result. Below is what the tools genuinely do well, what they do badly in ways that are invisible from the European side, and the one step that cannot be removed.
A text that is correct and has no voice
The first thing a Chinese reader notices is not an error, it is a texture. Sentences all of the same length, where a person would break the rhythm. A subject stated in every clause, where Chinese would drop it. Four-character expressions placed correctly and slightly too often, the way a diligent student uses them. Connectives repeated at the head of each paragraph. A register that sits a notch above the subject — the tone of an official notice applied to a product page. Nothing to correct, and nothing that sounds like someone talking to someone.
The title is where it shows first. A good Chinese title for an article or a post is not a translation of the European one: it is rebuilt, often shorter, often around the question the reader has rather than the subject the company wants to cover. A translated title is grammatical and inert, and it is the only part of the text most people will ever see.
The invented trade term
This is the error that costs money, and it is the one nobody on the European side can see. A tool asked to translate a technical word will always produce something: a plausible compound, built correctly from characters that mean the right things, that no one in that industry uses. The term that exists in Chinese is often not a translation at all — it can be an abbreviation, a loan, a number, or a word borrowed from a different trade. Standards and certification names, part names, material grades, machine categories: each of these has a settled Chinese form that comes from practice and cannot be derived.
What makes it expensive is that it is confident and it propagates. The invented term goes into the catalogue, the site, the quotation, the trade show panel and the specification sent to a supplier, and each copy makes the next correction harder. Meanwhile a buyer searching for the real term does not find you, and an engineer reading the page concludes that the company does not work in this field — which is a reasonable conclusion from the evidence in front of them.
What the tools are genuinely good at
| Task | What to expect | What still has to be checked |
|---|---|---|
| A first draft from a European source | A complete, accurate, lifeless text that saves the blank page and most of the structural work | Every technical term, the title, and the rhythm — in practice a rewrite rather than a correction |
| Variants of a short text | Ten versions of a title or a post caption, quickly, which is genuinely hard to do alone | Which ones a person would actually say out loud — the list is a shortlist, not an answer |
| Summarising a long Chinese document for internal use | A reliable sense of what a regulation, a report or a competitor's page is about | Anything you will act on: the summary points at the passage, it does not replace reading it |
| Searching inside a long document | Where a clause, a figure or a requirement is — the most underrated use of all | The passage itself, read in the original before it is quoted to anyone |
| Drafting a glossary | A first column of candidate terms to put in front of someone who knows the trade | All of it, by that person — and the result is then worth more than any single text |
| Transcription and subtitles | A usable transcript of a clearly spoken recording, which removes hours of work | Names, product references and anything said in a regional accent, which is where it quietly invents |
Human revision is not the optional step
The reviewer is a native speaker who knows the trade, not a bilingual generalist, and the instruction given to them matters as much as the choice. « Correct the mistakes » produces a corrected machine text, because there are no mistakes to find. « Rewrite anything a professional in this field would not say, and tell me which terms are wrong » produces a usable text and something more valuable: a list. Keep that list. A glossary built out of three revisions means the fourth text starts much further on, and it is the only part of this work that accumulates.
What you let leave the company
- Drawings and specifications. A dimensioned drawing or a full specification pasted into a service to be translated has left your building. Describe the part in words instead, or use a tool your company controls.
- Prices and costs. A price list, a cost breakdown or a margin is the information a competitor would pay for. It has no business in a prompt, whatever the tool promises about retention.
- Customer names and contact records. These are personal data as well as commercial data, which means two sets of reasons not to paste them, and in China a question about where the service sits.
- Unpublished product plans. A launch, a patent application in progress, a development with a partner. Nothing about the subject is urgent enough to need a machine translation today.
- Contract drafts. Use the tool to understand a Chinese clause someone sent you, never to produce the clause you will sign. A translated contract is a different document, and that is a lawyer's subject rather than a language one.
The closing point is the one that decides whether any of this matters. An unrevised Chinese text is recognised immediately — not after study, within the first screen, the way you recognise a machine-translated French page without being able to say which sentence gave it away. What the reader concludes is not that you used a tool; everyone uses tools. It is that nobody in your company read the page before publishing it, and therefore that nobody will read their message either. The judgement is about seriousness, and it is made before the product is ever considered.
Build the glossary before the first page. The working vocabulary of your trade, settled once with someone who works in that field in Chinese, covers most of what a tool would otherwise invent — and it makes every text afterwards faster rather than slower. It is the one piece of this work worth paying a person for, and the one that keeps its value.