Copy. Delete. Translate. Paste it back. Is that still how your translation process works?
Sound familiar? There’s a safer way, and a simpler one. We sat down with Kristīne Špate, Chair of the Board at LMI Translations, to talk about a common but risky habit in corporate translation workflows, and how the new ISO 18587 certification helps eliminate it.
Picture this: it’s Friday afternoon. By Monday morning, a client needs a 40-page contract ready to send to a partner in another country. There’s no translator on the team to hand it to, and this week’s outsourcing budget is already spent. A colleague opens a free AI translation tool, but there’s a catch: the contract is full of figures, client names, and confidential terms. So what do you do? First, you manually delete every piece of sensitive information. Then you paste the text into the translation tool. Then you put it all back by hand.
Every number. Every name. Every confidential detail.
And at the end, you just hope nothing got mixed up along the way.
More often than you’d think. Internally, we call it the “secret dance.” And I understand exactly why people do it - the deadline is close, time is short, pressure is mounting, and it feels like: “It’s just one document.”
But here’s the paradox: in trying to protect confidential information, this exact process creates the very risk you were trying to avoid.
Partially. But think about it: the moment that text goes into a free translation tool, it has often already “left its nest.” Depending on the tool and its terms of use, whatever you enter can be stored or used to improve the service and its models. And even when the most sensitive details are removed, the context stays, as well as the structure of the contract, the partner’s industry, the nature of the deal, and other telling details.
The second risk point is putting the information back in by hand. That’s exactly where mistakes creep in most easily: a number gets swapped, a name lands in the wrong paragraph, or a single “not” quietly disappears from a legally critical sentence.
And then the document looks finished, but one crucial question remains: can you really be sure everything is exactly where it should be?
No manual deleting. No manual pasting back in. The entire process is secure and considered from the very first step.
Simply put - we take the risk out of the equation. Your text never enters public translation tools. The entire process happens inside a closed, ISO 27001-certified environment, where confidentiality is built into the process itself, not dependent on how careful a tired employee can be on a Friday evening.
We use machine translation where it’s the right tool for the job, but the output is always checked and refined by a professional translator. Nothing needs to be manually deleted and put back, the full document, confidential information included, is handled securely from start to finish.
Quite the opposite. It’s worth asking what “doing it yourself” actually costs. An employee whose time costs the company far more than the translation itself spends hours manually deleting and re-inserting information - time that should go toward their actual job. On top of that comes the risk of error, which in the case of a contract can cost far more than a professional translation ever would.
Our ISO 18587 process lets you work faster and more efficiently: machine translation produces the first draft, and a professional translator reviews, edits, and refines it.
The client ends up with speed, value, and confidence that the document was handled confidentially and the translation was professionally reviewed.
It’s worth letting go of. Not because employees are doing anything wrong, but because they shouldn’t have to carry a risk that the process itself can eliminate. There’s now a secure, certified, cost-effective solution for exactly this problem. Your confidential information is too valuable to leave its security dependent on manual copying, deleting, and pasting back in.
Get in touch with LMI Translations: [email protected]
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