Do not use any translation app for allergies
Better Translate Team ·
This is the one thing we will tell you not to use our app for, and we would rather
say it here than only in the terms.
The failure mode that matters
Machine translation research sorts serious errors into three kinds: mistranslation, where content
comes back inaccurate; hallucination, where content appears that was never in the original; and
deletion, where content is dropped. Deletion includes the removal of negations.
Consider what that means for "this does not contain peanuts." A dropped negation does not produce
nonsense. It produces a fluent, confident sentence meaning the exact opposite of the truth, and
nothing on screen looks wrong.
Why the stakes are not theoretical
Guidance for travellers with food allergies is consistent: a mistake such as rendering one nut as
another can have life-threatening consequences, and allergen wording is not somewhere general
machine translation belongs. The long-standing advice is a translated chef card prepared in advance,
precisely because a reviewed translation is not the same thing as one read live off a phone.
What we do instead of claiming it is safe
- The original text stays on screen beside every translation, so you can point at the source and
ask a person.
- Our terms say it outright: do not rely on this app for allergens, medical instructions,
dosage, or anything where an error causes harm.
- Menu lines carry the recogniser's confidence, so a badly read line is treated as badly read
rather than presented as fact.
An app that told you it was safe for allergies would be a better sales pitch and a worse app.
Carry a card, and point at the original.