Can AI Translate Legal and Medical Documents? Why Certified Translation Still Needs a Human
AI translation tools have genuinely improved — for a tourist menu or a casual email, they often do a fine job. But for legal and medical documents, two problems remain that fluency alone does not solve.
First, courts, embassies, and government offices do not accept AI-generated translations as certified, regardless of how accurate the wording is — certification requires a human translator, registered where required, who signs a legal statement of accuracy and takes professional responsibility for it. No AI tool can do that, because the certification is a legal act, not a linguistic one.
Second, AI translation tools still make confident-sounding but wrong choices in exactly the places that matter most: a drug name that looks similar to another, a legal term that has a specific meaning in one jurisdiction's law but not another's, a contract clause where word order changes the obligation. A human reader cannot always tell when an AI tool has made this kind of mistake, because the output still reads smoothly — which is precisely what makes it risky for anything with legal or medical consequences.
We use translation technology ourselves to speed up repetitive, low-risk parts of a project — but every certified, legal, or medical translation still goes through a qualified human translator and a second human reviewer before it is delivered.