Why ISO-Certified and Sworn SA Translations Fail Quality Tests The "Certification" Trap in South African Language Translations If you are looking for professional South African language translation services in South Africa, you’ve likely seen the same three terms over and over: Certified , ISO-Certified , and Sworn. To a procurement manager or a business owner, these sound like guarantees of quality. However, as specialists who are frequently called in to "fix" documents already translated by agencies advertising this service, we can tell you the uncomfortable truth: A certificate for a process is not a certificate for linguistic accuracy. The Sworn Translation Myth In South Africa, a "Sworn Translation" is a legal formality. It means an individual has stood before a Commissioner of Oaths and sworn they believe the work is accurate. The problem? There is no mandatory requirement for that individual to have a degree in linguistics, 10 years of ...

 Why AI still can’t translate South African languages in 2026 We have all been there. You put a perfectly normal sentence into a popular translation tool and what comes out is absolute gibberish in isiXhosa or Sesotho. It is often funny but for those of us working in professional translation but it is also a bit alarming. While the world is obsessed with how "smart" AI has become, South Africa’s 11 official written languages remain a massive blind spot.  1. The data is thin and dusty AI is only as good as its library. For English, the AI has read almost everything ever written. For languages like Tshivenda or Xitsonga, the digital library is tiny. Most of the data the AI "learns" from comes from old religious texts or formal government documents. This means the AI ends up sounding like a 1920s preacher or a bored civil servant rather than a real person living in 2026. 2. Confident lying and "borrowed" words One of the biggest issues our team of first langu...