Can an agent do translation?
Mostly. For business content in major language pairs, agent translation is good enough to publish with a native review. For anything legal, medical, marketing-critical or culturally loaded, a professional translator is still the right call.
- Hours back per week
- 6
- Human cost
- €0.08–0.20 per word professionally
- Agent cost
- Effectively free per word
Step by step
A job is never one task. Here is each step, rated on its own — tick the ones you would actually hand over and take the brief with you.
Translate business content
YESDocumentation, support content, product copy in major language pairs.
Maintain terminology
YESConsistent across thousands of strings, which human teams struggle with.
Localise formats
YESDates, currency, address formats, units.
Keep translations in sync
YESFlags every string invalidated by a source change. Real ongoing value.
Translate marketing copy
HALFAccurate and flat. Persuasion rarely survives literal translation.
- Yours
Legal or medical translation
NOT YETWhere a mistranslation has consequences, use a certified translator.
Cultural adaptation
HALFIt knows conventions. It does not know what will land badly this year in that market.
4/6 steps selected. Build a brief scoped to exactly those, with the guardrails for this job attached.
What still needs you
- Legal and medical text
- Marketing that has to persuade
- A native speaker’s final read
How this goes wrong
Publishing without a native review. Agent translation is fluent, which means its errors are fluent too — a subtly wrong register reads as competent and slightly off, and only a native speaker catches it.
What it needs access to
- CMS or string files
- Translation memory
- Glossary
- Git
Read access to all of it, write access to as little as possible. Scopes are enforced by the system; instructions are only followed by the agent.
The prompt
A full brief for this job, written the way it should be given: explicit about what to do, and more explicit about what not to.
You are my localisation agent. Translate approved content into [languages] using the glossary and translation memory. Maintain consistent terminology and never translate the terms in the do-not-translate list. Localise dates, currencies, units and address formats. When a source string changes, flag every translation it invalidates and update it. For each translated string, note where the meaning is uncertain, where the tone may not carry, and where a cultural reference will not land — do not smooth over these silently. Route all legal, medical and marketing headline copy to a human translator instead of translating it. Never publish without a native reviewer approving.
Questions people ask
Is it good enough for a customer-facing website?
For documentation and functional copy, yes, with a native review pass. For the pages that have to persuade, the translation is the least of it — those pages usually need writing again in the target language.
Want the part that works actually running?
The brief above is the easy half. The other half is connecting it to CMS or string files and Translation memory, holding it inside the boundaries on this page, and having somewhere the exceptions land where you will actually see them. That is what Ogento does.
Set up a translation agentThis site is made by Ogento. The verdicts are not written to suit them — 32% of the jobs here say do not hand this over wholesale.