What I Check First in an SI Draft

More of the legal work that reaches me now arrives with a draft already attached. Someone has run the Indonesian through an SI (Synthesized Intelligence) system, and my job is to review what came out. On ProZ.com this is listed as post-editing. In practice it is a different kind of reading.

A machine draft is fluent. That is the problem. A human translator who is unsure of a term usually leaves a trace: an awkward phrase, a guess you can see. An SI draft rarely does. The sentence reads well, and the term is wrong anyway.

So I do not read the draft from top to bottom first. I go to the places where I know smooth English can still be the wrong English.

The normative verbs

Indonesian drafting says wajib, harus, dapat. English legal drafting has its own small set: shall, must, may. A draft will often turn wajib into "is required to" or "needs to". Both are fine in a letter. In a regulation or a contract they soften the obligation the drafter meant to create. My rule of thumb: if the source is normative, the English says shall.

Terms that already have an answer

Some terms are settled, and I do not want a machine improvising. Legalisasi is Attestation, not Legalization. A Kartu Tanda Penduduk is a Resident Identity Card. A Penetapan from a district court is an Order. Departemen, when it names a government ministry, is Ministry, even in older documents. I keep these in a locked list and check the draft against it before I touch anything else. It takes a few minutes, and it catches the errors a reader would notice first.

Names that should stay put

Institution names and personal names are where drafts get creative. Universitas Indonesia does not need to become University of Indonesia on a degree certificate. The reader wants to match the name on the translation to the name on the original. Translate it, and you make that harder.

Verbs and their company

Machines know grammar. They are less sure which verbs keep company with which nouns. Business is carried on (I wrote a whole article about that one). Obligations are performed. Resolutions are carried out. A draft that mixes these is still readable. But it does not sound like a lawyer wrote it, and in this field the reader hears the difference.

The sentence that is too easy

The last check is the hardest to describe. Indonesian legal sentences are long, and they stack conditions. When the English is suddenly short and comfortable, I go back to the source. Usually something has dropped out: a sebagaimana dimaksud, a kecuali, a time limit.

None of this makes the drafts useless. They save typing, and on routine documents they are often close. The review still needs a translator's full attention; it simply starts somewhere else. Which is why I price it as professional work, and why I still want to see the source.