How to Check a Machine-Translated Email Before You Send It

Machine translation has become remarkably good. For everyday business email between widely spoken languages, the output is often fluent enough that the recipient cannot tell. That is exactly the risk: fluent text hides its mistakes. A wrong number, a dropped negation, or an overly familiar tone reads naturally, so nobody catches it until the reply.

Professional translators have long distinguished between raw machine output and “post-edited” output that a human has checked and corrected. There is even an international standard for it, ISO 18587, which the European Commission has discussed in its translation workshops. You do not need to be a translator to borrow the core idea: check the parts most likely to go wrong, every time.

Check Names, Numbers, And Dates First

These are the highest-stakes errors and the easiest to verify, even if you do not read the target language well.

• Names of people, companies, and products should be unchanged. Some translation tools translate surnames that happen to be ordinary words.
• Numbers may change format. In many European languages a comma is the decimal separator, so 1.500 can mean one and a half or one thousand five hundred depending on the reader.
• Dates can flip between day-month and month-day order. Write months as words in the original (“4 March”) to avoid this entirely.
• Currencies and units should be explicit.

Compare the source and the translation line by line for these items. It takes two minutes.

Check That Negations Survived

A dropped “not” is the classic machine translation error, and it reverses meaning without making the sentence look wrong. Find every negative in your original (“cannot”, “will not”, “no longer”, “unless”) and confirm it appears in the translation. A quick back-translation of only those sentences, using a different tool, is a useful cross-check.

Check The Register

Many languages distinguish formal and informal address, such as “Sie” and “du” in German or “vous” and “tu” in French. Translation tools often guess, and they guess inconsistently within one email. Decide which you need, and check that the whole message uses it. When in doubt with a new business contact, formal is safer.

Tone also shifts in subtler ways. A direct English sentence can become blunt in translation, and a polite one can become stiff. If the stakes are high, ask a colleague who speaks the language to read just the opening and closing lines.

Write A Better Source Text

The easiest way to improve a translation is to improve what goes into it. Short sentences, one idea each, no idioms, no sarcasm, and no ambiguous pronouns translate far more reliably than casual English.

Before:

Just circling back on this, we are kind of up against it on timing so if you could take a look ASAP that would be amazing, otherwise we might have to push the whole thing.

After:

I am following up on the contract draft I sent on 4 March. We need your comments by Friday 13 March. If we do not receive them, we will need to move the signing date.

The second version translates cleanly into almost any language. Writing plain source text is also simply good writing; corporate jargon translated into plain English shows how much of everyday business English is idiom.

Keep Sensitive Text Off Public Tools

Contracts, personnel matters, and client data should not go into a free online translator without checking your company’s policy. Some organizations now run translation models locally for exactly this reason, and open-weights translation models make that increasingly practical; see open-weights translation models for work for what is available. If you write regularly in a second language, local AI for multilingual writing covers a private workflow.

A Context For Translation-Ready English

A Wrivio Context for preparing text before translation could say:

Rewrite this in plain, simple English suitable for machine translation. Use short sentences with one idea each. Remove idioms, slang, and sarcasm. Write dates with the month as a word. Keep every name, number, date, amount, and commitment exactly as written. Do not add or remove any requests or conditions.

Press Ctrl+Shift+Space, paste your draft, check the diff, then translate the cleaned version. The two-step approach catches more errors than editing the translation alone.

Common Questions

Is machine translation good enough for business emails?

Often yes for routine messages between widely spoken languages, provided you check names, numbers, dates, negations, and tone before sending. For contracts or anything legally binding, use a professional translator.

How can I check a translation if I do not speak the language?

Compare names, numbers, and dates line by line, then back-translate sentences containing negatives or commitments with a different tool. Ask a fluent colleague to read the opening and closing if the message is important.

What is post-editing in translation?

Post-editing is the process of a human reviewing and correcting machine translation output. It ranges from light corrections for meaning to full editing for publication quality.

How do I make my English easier to translate?

Use short sentences, avoid idioms and slang, spell out dates with the month as a word, and make every pronoun clear. Plain source text produces far more reliable translations.

Download Wrivio for Windows to turn casual English into clear, translation-ready text before you run it through a translator.