Fellow translators of uncommon sense,

One of you hit a wall this week.

After cruising through big bilingual tables in CotranslatorAI, things suddenly broke. Errors. Prompts rejected. The dreaded “you’ve exceeded the limit” message.

And the question came in fast:
“Why did this happen? Is it just me, or is CotranslatorAI not cut out for bigger jobs?”

That’s a fair question. And the answer opens up one of the most misunderstood things about using AI as a translator.

Let’s talk tokens.

Not words. Not characters. Tokens.
You don’t see them unless you’re looking. But every prompt you feed the AI is silently sliced up behind the scenes. A single sentence? Could be 10 tokens. Or 50. It adds up fast.

And the model you’re working with has a hard limit on how many tokens it can process at once. Push past that limit, and it breaks. Every time.

Now… if you’ve used ChatGPT, you might be thinking: “But I’ve written pages of conversation in there with no problem.” True. But what ChatGPT isn’t telling you is that it’s quietly discarding your earlier messages behind the scenes.

Yep. It forgets on purpose, so it doesn’t crash.

CotranslatorAI doesn’t do that. It resends the entire conversation each time. Why? Because when you’re translating, context matters. And dropping context mid-job isn’t just annoying… it’s dangerous.

This is why CotranslatorAI gives you more control and transparency. But that also means you’ve got to be a bit more aware. The freedom comes with responsibility.

So how do you stay in the clear?

Here’s your translator’s cheat sheet:

  • Watch the token counter in CotranslatorAI (bottom right)
  • Keep prompts under 20,000 tokens for best results in the latest models (and even that number is a bit risky sometimes)
  • Break big jobs into smaller sections. Don’t shove a novel in there.
  • Use structured prompts instead of going full Ad-hoc every time
  • And don’t expect the AI to explain its own limits… go to the source and read OpenAI’s official docs when in doubt

The point is: once you understand the rules of the road, you stop running into brick walls.

You can get back to doing the parts of translation you love… and leave the heavy lifting to the AI (without it crashing halfway through).

CotranslatorAI may not baby you like ChatGPT does. But that’s a good thing.

You’re not a chatbot hobbyist. You’re a professional translator using powerful tools to do better work, faster.

And you’re not alone. Keep the feedback coming. The more I hear about your real-world uses, the better I can help you get the most out of this tool.

Until next time, stay sharp and keep translating.

Steven
for the CotranslatorAI team