Insights, updates, and thoughts from the Frontier R&D team on AI-powered translation solutions, Bible translation innovation, and transformative technology.
What if the problems we're troubleshooting aren't problems with AI, but with a specific AI architecture chosen years ago—and the evidence we're debating is about a version of AI that is no longer the state of the art for translation?
Lean translation is a working framework for translation that replaces batch workflows with continuous feedback, empowers the expert over the process, and optimizes for judgment instead of output. This is how we think about what we're building.
AI can produce translation drafts at scale. The real question is: how much of it can you trust? Translation health is a simple idea—track how close each segment is to human-validated work—and it changes how teams work with AI.
A localization manager walks into a conference with a 98% TM match rate. A stranger asks a few simple questions. Adapted from The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt.
Translation memory databases store every approved translation with equal confidence—including the mistakes. The result is a quality problem that compounds silently for years.
Creating translated content is no longer the bottleneck. Trust, quality assurance, and the cost of scaling teams and languages remain just as hard—maybe harder, now that production is cheap.
One of the mistakes people make when thinking about AI is assuming that everything worth doing can be improved by technology. That claim has never been true. Some things are not bottlenecks because they are inefficient; they are constraints because they are fundamental.
AI has made translation fast, but speed alone doesn't solve the hardest problems. We outline the deeper issues—legitimacy, quality signaling, accountability, and sustainability—that must be addressed to make translation reliable at scale.
A new CNTI report reveals significant gaps in AI transcription and translation for low-resource languages. Discover how LangQuest and Codex are designed to solve this problem by documenting languages and enabling AI translation even for languages AI hasn't been trained on.
LangQuest — charting the living patterns of the world's languages