If you own or run a boutique translation agency, this is for you.
Your clients can buy machine translation without you… or they can even get it for free.
So if your agency’s AI strategy is to buy an engine, try to train it a bit (or hope it trains itself, LOL), and then hire translators to fix its output, what makes your service worth choosing?
Your answer probably comes down to expert translators, a detailed understanding of your clients, a better workflow backend, and quality you’re willing to stand behind.
But does your MTPE workflow actually use those strengths? Or does it hand your translators a generic draft and ask them to deliver your usual quality for less money?
What reason does that give your best translators to support the workflow?
Boutique LSPs can’t afford to sit out the changes happening in translation. But adopting the industry leaders’ tools without questioning their narrative isn’t much of a strategy either.
The mega agencies, MT providers, and CAT-tool makers I call the Localization Illuminati have their own businesses to protect. You shouldn’t assume their solutions will work for you.
There’s another approach that can build on your existing tools and translator relationships. Change who sets the direction: let your translators establish the style, terminology, and quality expectations before the AI generates the draft.
Now their expertise shapes the draft from the beginning. You’re giving the AI a standard to follow, not just giving the translator more output to fix.
Better MTPE. More value for your clients.
What if you could give clients a much better result than generic MTPE, at around half the price of full human translation?
That’s the commercial opportunity worth testing. Not simply cheaper machine output, but a more affordable service that still puts professional judgment in charge.
The approach is trained AI translation followed by human-directed MTPE. Your translator establishes a short project-specific sample. That sample, together with terminology and client instructions, guides the AI before it generates the draft. The translator then verifies and refines the result against the source.
“Trained” here means guided for your project using a translator-approved sample, clear instructions, and relevant translation memory and termbase matches where available. It does not mean retraining the underlying AI model.
As a working Korean-to-English translator, I judge a draft by whether it actually reduces my workload without compromising quality. Your agency’s savings depend on that same test.
Instead of paying for avoidable rewriting, you invest some expertise upfront so more of the review effort can go toward accuracy, consistency, and client requirements.
For clients, the value is straightforward: more of their content becomes affordable to translate, without dispensing with high-quality professional review. For your agency, that gives you a reason to win the work beyond offering another discount on generic MTPE.
I call this GAIT-Augmented MTPE. But the name isn’t what clients are buying. They’re buying translation that meets their needs at a price they can justify.
Give clients a better reason to choose you
Using the same engine as another agency doesn’t automatically make your services identical. But if the engine supplies the draft and your expertise enters only afterward, you’re leaving an important advantage unused.
Your translators’ judgment, your knowledge of the client and the project, and your quality requirements should shape the translation from the beginning.
You don’t need to wait for the big players to package this on their terms. You can start talking to clients today, execute the approach with translators you already trust, and build a service around results you’ve verified.
If you’d like to explore it, I’ve put together some resources:
To see what this looks like in practice, start with the two-minute demo. The other resources explain the approach and how to involve your translators.
GAIT-Augmented MT & MTPE Demo (two-minute video)
https://cotranslatorai.com/
GAIT-Augmented MT & MTPE Overview (long version)
https://cotranslatorai.com/
Onboarding Your Best Translators
https://cotranslatorai.com/
MT & MTPE Reinvented
https://cotranslatorai.com/mt-
If any of this looks interesting, I’d love to share more. Reply to this email if you’d like to talk.
Steven S. Bammel
SLV Principal | Translator | Language Workflow Specialist
P.S. Wondering whether this would work for your agency? Reply with the kind of projects you handle and what frustrates you about MTPE. I’d be glad to help you identify a sensible first test.
