How long will humans be needed for translation?

"For plenty of use cases, raw AI translation is now the right call: multiplying your costs by 100 to catch the last few percent of errors isn't rational if you're translating internal documents or product listings," says John Zimmerman, founder of OKA (Open Knowledge Association), a Swiss non-profit that translates Wikipedia articles into other languages.

"For an encyclopedia it's different. Wikipedia runs on trust. A wrong fact can sit there for years and get cited by journalists and AI systems," he says.

With more than 10,000 published pieces, mostly into Spanish, Portuguese and English, OKA is, Zimmerman says, the single largest contributor of translated articles to the collaborative online encyclopedia.

Which is something it absolutely could not have become without AI.