8 Common Translation Mistakes and How to Avoid Them

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The most common translation mistakes are translating word for word, ignoring context, using inconsistent terminology, leaving parts of the content untranslated, ignoring text length and layout, keeping the wrong date and number formats, missing cultural differences, and publishing without a review. Almost all of them are prevented by the same three things: giving translators context, keeping a glossary, and having a native speaker check the result where it will appear.

Key takeaways

• Word-for-word translation creates false friends and unnatural sentences. Translate meaning.
• Consistency matters as much as accuracy. A glossary and a short style guide fix most terminology problems.
• On websites, the most visible errors are untranslated buttons, emails, image text and SEO metadata.
• Translated text is often longer than English, sometimes much longer for short labels. Design for it.
• Review translations in context, on the real page, before customers see them.

1. Translating word for word

Literal translation is the classic mistake, and it produces two kinds of errors.

False friends. Words that look alike in two languages but mean different things:

Unnatural structure. Even when each word is right, sentences built on the source language’s grammar read badly. English marketing copy full of short imperative phrases (“Grab yours. Ship free. Love it.”) often needs to become a longer, differently structured sentence to sound natural in German or Japanese.

How to avoid it: ask for translation of meaning, not words, and have a native speaker read the result out loud. If it sounds translated, it needs another pass.

2. Ignoring context and multiple meanings

Many words have several meanings, and the translator (or the machine) has to guess which one you mean. In English, “Book” can be a noun or a verb; “Save” can mean store a file or spend less money; “Free” can mean without charge or available. On a website, a lone button label like “Book” or “Save” shows up in a translation list with no surrounding sentence at all.

How to avoid it: give context. Screenshots, the page URL, a note like “button on the checkout page” or “verb: reserve a table” prevent most of these errors. Translating directly on the page, in a visual editor, solves the problem at the source.

3. Inconsistent terminology (no glossary, no style guide)

The same product feature called three different names across three pages confuses customers and makes support harder. It happens whenever several translators, or several machine translation runs, work without shared rules.

A glossary lists key terms and their approved translations, plus terms that must never be translated (brand and product names, often). A style guide covers tone and formality (for example informal du or formal Sie in German, tu or vous in French), punctuation, and how to write numbers and dates. Public examples are the free Microsoft localization style guides, which are useful models even if you only write a one-page version of your own.

How to avoid it: start a glossary before the first translation, and add to it whenever a question comes up. Our guide to building a localization glossary shows what to include.

4. Leaving parts of the content untranslated

A page that is 90% translated still looks unfinished. On websites the gaps tend to be the same:

• buttons, form labels, placeholders and error messages;
• navigation menus and footer links;
• image alt text and text embedded inside images;
• pop-ups, cookie banners and chat widgets;
• order confirmations and other transactional emails;
• PDFs and downloadable files;
• page titles, meta descriptions and structured data, which search engines show in results;
• links that send a French reader to an English page when a French version exists.

How to avoid it: make an inventory of everything a customer sees in the journey, not just the main page content, and check each language version end to end, including a test purchase or sign-up.

5. Ignoring text expansion and layout

Translations are rarely the same length as the original. The W3C’s article on text size in translation cites IBM guidelines for English translated into European languages: text up to 10 characters can grow by 200–300%, while text over 70 characters grows by around 130%. Short labels are the worst affected, which is exactly where layouts are tightest: buttons, tabs, menus.

The same article notes that Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters are more complex, so even with fewer characters a translation can need more horizontal space. Right-to-left languages such as Arabic and Hebrew need the layout mirrored.

How to avoid it: leave room in the design, avoid fixed-width buttons, don’t put text in images, and check every language on mobile.

6. Keeping the wrong date, number and currency formats

“03/04/2026” is 4 March in the US and 3 April in the UK and most of Europe. “1,500” is one thousand five hundred in English and one and a half in German, where the decimal separator is a comma. Prices, units (miles vs kilometres), phone numbers and addresses all have local conventions.

How to avoid it: decide the format rules per language in your style guide. For dates in running text, writing the month as a word (“3 April 2026”) removes ambiguity. Developers can use locale data such as Unicode CLDR instead of hard-coding formats.

7. Missing cultural differences

A correct translation can still be the wrong message. Common blind spots:

• Idioms and slang that make no sense elsewhere (“hit it out of the park” needs a baseball culture). See our guide to translating slang.
• Formality. Addressing German or Japanese business customers too casually can come across as disrespectful; being too formal in some other markets sounds cold.
• Images, colours and symbols that carry different meanings, and hand gestures that are rude in some countries.
• Examples and references: holidays, sports, measurement units, public figures.
• Regional variants of one language. Spanish for Spain and for Mexico differ in vocabulary and sometimes in which words are offensive.

How to avoid it: brief translators on audience and intent, and have someone from the target market review marketing content. This is the difference between translation and localization.

8. Publishing without a review

The mistake behind all the others. Whether a translation comes from a machine, a freelancer or an agency, somebody who speaks the language should check it before customers see it, ideally in context on the real page. International standards agree: ISO 17100, the standard for translation services, requires translations to be revised by a second person.

How to avoid it: build review into the workflow. Machine translation for the first draft, then human review, prioritised by traffic and revenue: homepage, product and pricing pages, checkout, and the emails every customer receives. Our translation quality page explains how that works in practice.

A quick checklist before you publish a translation

• Translated for meaning, read aloud by a native speaker
• Glossary terms and brand names used consistently
• Buttons, forms, errors, emails, alt text and metadata translated
• Links point to the page in the same language
• Layout checked for longer text, on desktop and mobile
• Dates, numbers, currency and units in local format
• Idioms, images and tone checked for the target culture
• Reviewed in context on the live or staging page

How ConveyThis helps you avoid these mistakes

On a website, most of these mistakes come from translating text away from the page it belongs to. ConveyThis works the other way round. It detects the text on your site, including menus, buttons, forms, alt text and SEO metadata, translates it automatically into any of 210 languages, and lets you review and edit every sentence in a visual editor that shows it in place. A glossary (on paid plans) enforces your terminology and do-not-translate list, translation memory reuses approved wording, and team roles let you invite a native reviewer or professional translator for each language. See the full list on the features page.

Many translation problems aren’t caused by the translator at all. We cover that side in why bad translation is not always the translator’s fault.

Frequently asked questions

What is the most common translation mistake? Translating word for word instead of translating meaning. It causes false friends, unnatural sentences and lost nuance.

How do I check a translation if I don’t speak the language? Ask a native speaker you trust to review it in context, back-translate a few key sentences with a different machine translation engine to spot obvious errors, and check that all glossary terms are present.

Is machine translation good enough to publish? For many pages, as a first draft, yes. For pages that sell, legal text and anything where tone matters, add human review.

What is a false friend in translation? A word that looks like a word in another language but means something different, such as Spanish embarazada (pregnant), not “embarrassed”.

Want to translate your site and review every word in context? Create a ConveyThis account.