AI Translation from English to Amharic Translation

How good is AI translation from English to Amharic?

Two or more solutions meet every Basic and Standard requirement in Amharic only as three-step solutions (translation + LQA + repair).
Two or more solutions meet every Advanced requirement in Amharic only as solutions with the gender-neutrality agent.
The cheapest solution that meets every Standard requirement costs $612 per million characters, and the fastest takes 316 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 Amharic.
Tone of voice	The formal register (respectful verb forms) 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 Amharic 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 Amharic, 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 11 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 Amharic translation

Constraints

None of the solutions with one or two steps meet the Basic requirements in Amharic, which cover general translation quality alone. For the Standard requirements, only the three-step solution (translation + LQA + repair) on Google Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview fits a cost cap from $613 to $650 per million characters or a time limit from 317 to under 485 seconds per 1,000 words. None fit a cap of at most $612 or a limit of at most 316 seconds. None of the solutions that meet every Advanced requirement cost under $1,043 per million characters.

Agent effect

For the Advanced requirements, the gender-neutrality agent works with both three-step solutions (translation + LQA + repair). On Google Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview the cost goes from $612 to $1,043 per million characters and the time from 316 to 321 seconds per 1,000 words. On OpenAI GPT-5.5 the cost goes from $651 to $1,079 per million characters and the time from 485 to 484 seconds per 1,000 words. Total errors fall from 11.6 to 11.5 and from 18.8 to 15.8 per 1,000 words.

English to Amharic 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☆☆