Does AI translation quality differ much between languages?

AI translation delivers impressive results overall, but quality varies. That variation does not come from inherent differences in language difficulty, though. AI is “language agnostic” and does not internalize labelled languages or treat each one separately. Quality depends on the data used to train the models: some languages have much larger datasets than others, which is why some languages perform better. Still, the technology can form connections between data points and achieve strong results for languages with far less data than English. This applies not only to leading languages such as French or Spanish but also to languages like Chinese, Arabic, Russian, and Hindi, and less common languages are catching up quickly. AI remains less capable in languages of limited diffusion, but that only makes the translator’s role more important: by following best-practice workflows, translators can embed their expertise into the process even more effectively.