How to check a translation in a language you cannot read

An author commissioning a translation into a language they cannot read is in an uncomfortable position: paying for a product they cannot judge. The feeling is understandable but overstated. A large share of book-translation failures are not matters of phrasing at all — they are matters of consistency and completeness, and those can be checked without knowing a word of the target language.

1. Length and completeness

Start with numbers. Compare word or character counts between source and translation. A reasonable ratio varies by language pair, but an unusual shortfall means text has been dropped. Then count chapters, headings and heading numbers. A missing chapter does happen, and it surfaces in two minutes.

2. Names in one spelling

Pick ten personal and place names and search for each in the translated file. You do not need to understand the sentence to see that a name appears in two forms. This is the check that catches the most common failure in long books.

3. Numbers, dates and units

Numbers are not translated — they are copied, which makes an error in them conspicuous. Go through dates, ages, distances and quantities and compare against the source. If you agreed to convert units, confirm the conversion is applied throughout rather than in one chapter.

4. Structure and formatting

Footnotes in position, lists still lists, block quotes still indented, headings at the same hierarchy level. Translation that has passed through automated tooling tends to lose exactly this layer, and it is visible without reading a word.

5. The reverse check

Take three paragraphs of the translation and run them back into your own language with any free tool. The result will not be pretty, and it is not meant to be — you are inspecting content, not style. If a sentence returns with a clearly different meaning, or with a clause missing, you have found something worth asking about.

6. Dialogue as a gauge

If the book contains dialogue, that is where a weak translation breaks first. Even without reading the language you can see things: whether sentence lengths in dialogue resemble the source or have all grown, whether punctuation and dashes survived, whether short exclamations stayed short. Dialogue in which every line has grown by a third is a sign that the translation is explaining rather than speaking.

Ask a native reader to read three lines of dialogue aloud. If they stumble or correct themselves as they go, it sounds like written text rather than a person talking — a problem readers feel even when they cannot articulate it.

7. A native reader, on three passages

What remains — whether it sounds natural — needs a person. But that person does not need to read the whole book. Choose a passage from the opening, one from the middle and one from the end, and ask exactly three questions: does this sound like a book originally written in this language, does the speaker sound like the same person across all three, and does anything sound over-translated. Three specific questions produce far more than a general request to "look over the text".

We cover what produces these problems in context windows and consistency, and how to choose an approach in a human translator versus AI.