Review machine-translated content
The uncomfortable fact about machine translation is that you usually cannot judge it yourself. A translation into a language you do not read looks exactly as convincing when it is wrong.
That is the reason this review exists and the reason it needs a person who reads the target language.
Who reviews
Someone who reads the target language natively or near-natively, and who understands what your business does. Both halves matter: a fluent reader without domain knowledge will not notice that a product name was translated, and a colleague with domain knowledge but weak language will not notice register problems.
If you have nobody, translate a small pilot and pay a professional to review it once. What you learn — the terms that come out wrong, the register that needs adjusting — applies to everything that follows.
What a reviewer should check
Accuracy. Does it say what the source says? Specifically: are the qualifiers intact, are the negations intact, and are the conditions intact? "Usually ships in three days" and "ships in three days" are different promises.
Terminology. Product names, service names, feature names, brand terms and industry vocabulary. POM AI has no glossary, so these are the most likely errors and the most damaging ones. See Provide context and terminology.
Register. Formality, the choice between formal and informal address, and the conventions your market expects. This is where a technically correct translation most often feels wrong.
Locale conventions. Currency, units, date and number formats, address and phone formats, and any legally required consumer wording. These are translated as text, not converted, so a price in euros stays in euros and a European date format stays European.
Cultural fit. Idioms, humour, sporting or cultural references and puns translate literally. Content built on wordplay needs rewriting for the market, not translating into it.
What you can check without the language
Plenty, and it is worth doing before the language review so the reviewer's time goes on language:
- Links point to the translated destination where one exists. Links to items not yet translated stay pointing at the source language.
- Layout renders correctly on the front end, desktop and mobile. Translated text often runs longer than the original and overflows fixed-size elements.
- Shortcodes and builder sections survived, and every visible label actually changed language. A label still in the source language usually means the builder does not declare that attribute as translatable. See Preserve formatting, shortcodes and links.
- The excerpt is still in the source language, because excerpts are copied rather than translated. Translate it.
- Images are shared with the original, with alternative text still in the source language.
- The slug is derived from the translated title; check it is sensible for that market.
- SEO fields — title tag, meta description — are separate from the content and need their own attention.
- Numbers, prices, codes and product references match the source exactly.
Reviewing a bulk run
Reading 400 translations individually is not realistic. Sample intelligently instead:
- Read the summary list from the run. Failures are shown inline and are easy to miss when the progress bar reached 100%.
- Review every high-value page in full — home, main services, pricing, contact, anything legal.
- Sample the rest: one item per post type, one long and one short, and anything with unusual formatting.
- Do a terminology pass across everything: search the translated content for your fixed terms and confirm they were not translated.
- Spot-check links on the pages that matter.
The terminology pass is the one that scales. It catches the systematic error, which is the error worth catching.
Fixing what you find
Small wording problems — edit the translated post directly. It is an ordinary WordPress post.
Awkward but accurate phrasing — the paragraph assistant in rewrite mode, with a prompt asking for natural phrasing without changing meaning, works well on translated text. See Correct and polish text. It cannot detect a mistranslation, so check accuracy first.
A systematic terminology error — fix it everywhere at once, and add the term to the business short description so future translations have a better chance.
A fundamentally wrong translation — re-translating with the per-post button overwrites the existing translation and any corrections in it. Usually editing is better.
Before publishing
Translations inherit the status of the source, so a published post produces a published translation. On a site where review happens after translation, that means unreviewed content can be live.
If that is a problem, translate from drafts, or plan the review immediately after the run rather than as a later task.
The standard to hold
Publish a translation when someone who reads the language has read it and would put their name to it. Not when the run completed without errors.