Our Human-AI Collaborative Translation Process: Let AI Do the Heavy Lifting, Humans Add the Soul
Sharing a translation workflow that has been tested in practice, through fine-grained division of labor between AI and humans, significantly improving efficiency while ensuring quality.
# Our Human-AI Collaborative Translation Process: Let AI Do the Heavy Lifting, Humans Add the Soul

Recently, I was translating the book *Agentic Design Patterns*, and I developed a smooth "human-AI collaborative" workflow. This isn't just "AI translation + human proofreading"; rather, it involves a more detailed division of labor between AI and humans.
## Step 1: Define Rules, Let AI Lay the Foundation
Before we begin, we establish a set of clear translation rules. This step is crucial—it's the foundation for all subsequent work and can significantly reduce the need for rework.
We keep the rules on GitHub, including terminology consistency, formatting requirements, and quality standards. With the rules in place, we let AI (e.g., Gemini 2.5 Pro) perform the initial translation based on the original text. The core goal here is "completeness"—ensuring all content is translated without omissions.
## Step 2: AI Cross-Review, Elevating the Minimum Quality Standard
This is a particularly interesting step in our process. After the initial translation, we don't immediately start editing ourselves; instead, we introduce another AI model (e.g., Sonnet 4.5).
We have the second AI act as a reviewer, giving it our translation rules and asking it to cross-review the first draft. The review focuses on two key areas: the naturalness of Chinese expression and the optimization of long-sentence translations.
Why do this? Because different AI models have different blind spots and strengths. Using one AI to correct another often reveals awkward phrasing that humans might easily overlook. After this step, the draft is already at a solid 80-90% quality level, with stable performance.
## Step 3: Human Fine-Tuning, Injecting the Soul
AI's work is done here; the stage is now set for humans.
We conduct two to three rounds of human reading and proofreading. For example, my personal habit is to read with a side-by-side Chinese-English comparison. Although AI translations no longer have many hard flaws, there's still some stiffness in how long sentences are handled.
At this point, I personally prefer using "free translation" to address this. That is, I step out of the original sentence structure and, based on an understanding of the author's intent, rewrite the sentence in a way that's more in line with Chinese reading habits. This step is key to elevating translation from "understandable" to "smooth" and "natural," and it's currently the hardest for AI to replace.
## Step 4: Team Final Review, Ensuring Consistency
We also have a translation team. After individual fine-tuning, we cross-review the drafts within the team.
This step primarily addresses consistency issues. For example, is a specific technical term translated the same way in Chapter 1 and Chapter 5? Is the overall writing style consistent? Everyone discusses and reaches a consensus.
Once all chapters are translated, we do a final overall proofread to ensure there are no mistakes.
## Final Step: Deployment and Launch
After all work is completed, we deploy the final product as a more readable webpage, not just as a document.

In this workflow, AI handles 70% of the heavy lifting and basic quality assurance, while humans focus on the 30% most valuable work—enhancing readability and ensuring accurate thought transmission. The results are excellent, and I recommend it to friends who need to translate technical documents.
Interestingly, the translators of *The Illustrated Large Models* are also using a similar workflow. Their clever touch is to first batch-organize and translate terminology, which greatly helps with translation consistency.
At the end of the day, a good translation workflow isn't about replacing humans; it's about letting humans do the work that truly requires human judgment and creativity.
发布时间: 2025-10-22 07:30