AI Translation from English to Afrikaans Translation

How good is AI translation from English to Afrikaans?

Only the three-step solution (translation + LQA + repair) on Anthropic Claude Fable 5 meets every Basic and Standard requirement in Afrikaans.
Only the three-step solution (translation + LQA + repair) on Anthropic Claude Fable 5 with the gender-neutrality agent meets every Advanced requirement in Afrikaans.
The only solution that meets every Standard requirement costs $562 per million characters and takes 203 seconds per 1,000 words.

A solution is a model plus its harness: prompts, glossaries and other context, pre- and post-processing. It meets a quality level when it meets every requirement of the level.

Requirement	Description	Met when
Basic requirements for any company
General translation quality	Translation errors of every type, such as mistranslations, omissions and grammar errors, classified by type and severity following MQM, the industry standard.	No critical error, at most 3 major errors in the four test texts (3,034 words) and at most 20 errors per 1,000 words, weighted by severity (minor 1, major 5, critical 10).
Standard requirements adds the rules companies set for their content
Terminology	The approved translation of every glossary term, in any of its correct forms.	100% of the glossary terms. We test it in the 16 languages with a glossary, so it does not apply in Afrikaans.
Tone of voice	The formal register (u) in every sentence in the second person or the imperative.	100% of those sentences.
Tags	Every HTML tag of the source, with its attributes, in the translation.	100% of the tags.
Unicode character integrity	Every character intact, with no corrupted characters and no letter from another script that only looks like the right one.	100% of the characters.
Locale conventions	The punctuation marks of the target language in place of the English ones.	No pass-or-fail bar. We report it as a share, because whether to localize punctuation is a matter of house style.
HTML entities	No HTML character code, such as the code for a quotation mark, that the source does not carry.	No added HTML entity.
Valid JSON	The translated JSON document still parses.	The document parses.
Spacing at tag boundaries	The spaces next to HTML tags stay as in the source.	100% of the tag boundaries.
Advanced requirements adds a requirement for some companies and use cases
Gender neutrality	A gender-neutral translation wherever the English source leaves the gender of a person open, as in “your manager” or “the expert”.	100% of the sentences that refer to a person.

Find English to Afrikaans translation solutions for your requirements

Pick a quality level, or your own requirements, bars and constraints, to see the shortlisted solutions that meet them in Afrikaans, with a column for each requirement you select. Under Optimize for, choose which of them comes first: the one with the fewest total errors, the lowest cost or the shortest time. Click a column heading to sort by it.

The shortlisted solutions on 13 models, with their Intento LQA results. Total errors per 1,000 words add the weighted general translation quality errors (minor 1, major 5, critical 10) to the missed glossary terms, sentences in the wrong register, tag errors and sentences that fail gender neutrality, each counted once. Formatting counts as met or missed and does not add to the total errors. The models that did not make the shortlist have automatic scores only: the shortlist. Gender neutrality: the Advanced requirements count the two best solutions of the language, with the gender-neutrality agent where they need it. The results of the other solutions are shown for information.

How we measure it: 11-01 · 11-02

Trade-offs in English to Afrikaans translation

Constraints

For the requirements of every level, Optimize for selects the same solution for quality, cost and latency: the three-step solution (translation + LQA + repair) on Anthropic Claude Fable 5, with the gender-neutrality agent for the Advanced requirements. A limit of one or two steps leaves solutions with at least 28.7 weighted errors per 1,000 words, on OpenAI GPT-5.5 with one step. A real-time limit (<2 sec) leaves three shortlisted solutions, and the one on Translated Lara 2 has the fewest total errors, 51.2 per 1,000 words.

Trade-off

Three three-step solutions on other models cost less and take less time, but have more weighted errors. Against the solution on Anthropic Claude Fable 5, the one on OpenAI GPT-5.6 Terra costs $492 instead of $562 per million characters and takes 152 instead of 203 seconds per 1,000 words. But it has more total errors, 21.8 instead of 19.1 per 1,000 words, with three major errors instead of none and weighted errors above the bar.

Agent effect

For the Advanced requirements, the gender-neutrality agent raises the cost of the three-step solution on Anthropic Claude Fable 5 from $562 to $968 per million characters. The time stays at 203 seconds per 1,000 words. Total errors rise from 19.1 to 19.4 per 1,000 words. Weighted errors rise from 18.8 to 19.4 per 1,000 words and major errors from none to one, both within the bars of general translation quality.

English to Afrikaans translation quality levels

A solution meets general translation quality with no critical error, at most three major errors and at most 20 weighted errors per 1,000 words.

Optimize for

Basic requirements☆