If you need a document translated between English and Afrikaans, it might be tempting to paste it into Google Translate and call it a day. It’s fast, it’s free, and the result looks like a perfectly readable Afrikaans translation.

But looks can be deceiving. The consequences of a poor translation surface at the worst possible moment: in a client meeting, on a product label, in a submitted report. By then, the damage is already done.

The good news is that such errors are entirely avoidable, but only if you understand what AI translation actually does to Afrikaans, and what it can’t yet do in either direction.

Why Afrikaans presents unique translation challenges

Afrikaans has a complex history that makes it one of the most nuanced languages in the world. Rooted in the Dutch spoken by Cape Colony settlers from 1652, it diverged into a distinct language during the 18th century through sustained contact between European settlers, enslaved people from Indonesia, Madagascar, India, Sri Lanka, and the East African coast, and the indigenous Khoikhoi and San. The result was a language shaped by Malay, Portuguese, Khoisan, and various African languages, standardised only in 1925, and still evolving today.

According to Census 2022, Afrikaans has approximately 6.4 million first-language speakers in South Africa, which comprises 10.6% of the population, down from 13.5% in 2011. Additional speakers live in Namibia and diaspora communities worldwide.

This layered history is exactly what makes Afrikaans difficult for AI to handle accurately. Unlike widely spoken languages such as English, Spanish, or French, Afrikaans is a “low-resource language” in NLP terms, meaning there is far less digitised text available for AI tools to train on than for major world languages. This gap directly affects translation quality.

The consequences are practical and immediate. Warren Hawkins, MD of Euphoria Telecom, warns that AI models frequently misidentify Afrikaans as Dutch, producing transcripts, summaries, and translations that are wrong from the ground up. Although the two languages share roots, they have diverged so significantly in pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar over three centuries that Dutch-trained models perform poorly on Afrikaans text and speech. For businesses using AI transcription tools in meetings, legal proceedings, or customer communications, this misidentification introduces real operational risk.

In a LitNet article by Jean Oosthuizen, language scholars also note considerable variation in how AI handles different African languages. Jeanne-Marie Jackson, a researcher with expertise in Afrikaans, Shona, and Fante, has observed that AI performs reasonably well for Afrikaans, moderately for Shona, and poorly for Fante. This distinction is a reminder that even within the low-resource category, the challenges vary significantly.

It’s partly why Google South Africa and the Pan South African Language Board recently launched a multilingual AI glossary in Afrikaans, Zulu, and Xhosa. For millions of South Africans, the tools and terminology of AI still don’t exist in their own language.

What machine translation actually does with Afrikaans idioms

Afrikaans is rich in idiomatic expressions – phrases whose meaning has nothing to do with the individual words. Machine translation tools translate word-for-word. As such, the results range from confusing to unintentionally comic.

Hy het sy gat gesien.

Literal machine translation: “He saw his ass.”

Actual meaning: He failed badly / It all went wrong for him.

Moenie die hoender ruk nie.

Literal machine translation: “Do not shake the chicken.”

Actual meaning: Don’t overdo it / Don’t push your luck.

Iemand heuning om die mond smeer.

Literal machine translation: “Smear honey around someone’s mouth.”

Actual meaning: To flatter someone / to butter someone up.

Soek wors in ‘n hondehok.

Literal machine translation: “Looking for sausage in a dog kennel.”

Actual meaning: Looking for something you won’t find / a needle in a haystack.

Imagine any one of those appearing in a translated business proposal or published article. A fluent reader wouldn’t just be confused, they’d question the credibility of everything around it.

Wordplay and culturally embedded humour are even harder. The beloved French comic series Asterix has been translated into Afrikaans, but only by skilled human translators at Protea Boekhuis, working specifically to render the wordplay, character-name puns, and cultural references that are the series’ whole point.

In the Oosthuizen article, experts argue it’s precisely because AI can’t navigate this kind of layered, culturally embedded wit that such translation remains a human endeavour. The same applies wherever tone, humour, or cultural resonance forms part of the message, which in professional communication is more often than most clients realise.

The anglicism trap: when English idioms invade Afrikaans translation

The problem runs in both directions. When translating from English into Afrikaans, AI frequently produces anglicisms – constructions that look and sound like Afrikaans but are direct imports of English phrasing that displace the correct Afrikaans expression. VivA (Virtuele Instituut vir Afrikaans) defines an anglicism as a language construct directly carried over from English that undermines an existing Afrikaans idiom. Anglicisms are so common in colloquial Afrikaans that many native speakers no longer recognise them as errors, which makes them all the more dangerous in formal, professional, or published text.

Three well-documented examples illustrate how this plays out in practice:

“Let the cat out of the bag” has a direct Afrikaans equivalent: die aap uit die mou laat (literally, “let the monkey out of the sleeve”). The anglicism, and a common AI output, is die kat uit die sak laat, a word-for-word import of the English phrase that replaces a perfectly good Afrikaans expression with a foreign construction.

“Time is running out” produces the anglicism die tyd hardloop uit,  a mechanical import of “run out” rendered as hardloop, which in Afrikaans means to run on foot. The correct expressions are die tyd raak min or die tyd is verstreke, confirmed by the Handwoordeboek van die Afrikaanse Taal (HAT).

“Address a problem” produces the anglicism ‘n probleem aanspreek, a direct calque of the English verb “address.” The correct Afrikaans is ‘n probleem hanteer (handle a problem) or ‘n probleem oplos (solve a problem), depending on context.

In each case the anglicism is intelligible, which is precisely what makes it dangerous. A non-native reviewer, or an AI editor, may not flag it. A fluent Afrikaans reader will notice it immediately. A qualified human translator or editor doesn’t just know what the words mean; they know which Afrikaans expressions already exist, and use them accordingly.

The words that simply don’t translate

The anglicism trap is one face of the translation challenge. The other is the Afrikaans vocabulary that simply has no equivalent in the target language.

Lekker literally means “nice” or “pleasant,” but functions as an all-purpose expression of approval, enjoyment, and feeling good. Translating Dit was lekker as “it was nice” strips it of its warmth and cultural weight.

Nou-nou is a well-known trap. It looks as though it should mean “right now”, but it actually means “soon” or “in a moment,” and is notably more immediate than the South African English “just now,” which can mean considerably later or even never. A translator who renders Ek sal jou nou-nou bel as “I will call you right now” hasn’t only mistranslated the word, they’ve communicated the opposite of the speaker’s meaning.

Tuis translates to “home” but carries a deeper sense of belonging and comfort that the English word doesn’t fully convey – a distinction that matters in marketing copy or creative writing.

These aren’t edge cases. They’re everyday words requiring a translator who understands cultural context, not just vocabulary. As noted by the acclaimed Afrikaans translator, Daniel Hugo: good translation demands an ear for style, register, and wordplay – precisely the qualities AI remains, for now, tone-deaf to.

Translating into Afrikaans: the challenges run the other way too

The challenge is not one-directional. Translating from English into Afrikaans carries its own set of pitfalls, ones that AI handles poorly and that even a fluent but untrained Afrikaans speaker can easily miss.

Words that require description, not translation. Some English concepts have no single Afrikaans equivalent and must be rendered as a phrase or explanation. “Privacy” has the approximate privaatheid, but this term doesn’t carry all the legal and social connotations of the English word and a translator must judge how to handle the gap depending on context. “Awkward” in a social sense has no direct Afrikaans equivalent. You’ll get ongemaklik, which means “uncomfortable”, onhandig meaning “clumsy”, and vreemd meaning “strange”, but none really captures the social discomfort the English word conveys. AI tends to pick the nearest single word and move on, producing a translation that is present on the page but wrong in meaning.

Compound words that must be written as one. Afrikaans routinely combines words into a single compound word where English uses two or more separate words. “Translation textbook” becomes vertaalhandboek. “Computer mouse” becomes rekenaarmuis. “Fast food restaurant” becomes kitskosrestaurant. “Toy shop” becomes speelgoedwinkel. AI tools frequently produce these as two separate words in Afrikaans, creating spelling and grammatical errors. The rules governing when components require a hyphen versus solid compounding are set out in the Afrikaanse Woordelys en Spelreëls (AWS), the authoritative standard for written Afrikaans since 1917. Getting this wrong is a reliable marker of machine-generated or insufficiently reviewed text.

These challenges show that translating accurately into Afrikaans requires more than a good dictionary and a working knowledge of the language. It requires cultural fluency, grammatical precision, and familiarity with the rules that govern how Afrikaans is written – rules that AI applies inconsistently and that an untrained reviewer may not know to check. The result of getting it wrong is text that passes a surface reading but fails the moment a fluent speaker engages with it seriously.

What else can go wrong

The challenges above, including idioms, anglicisms, untranslatable words, and compound words, represent the most visible failure modes. But a good translator also navigates subtler terrain that AI handles poorly in both languages.

Tone and register matter enormously. Afrikaans operates across a wide register spectrum: from the static, formal end of official and legal language to the intimate register of colloquial speech. A text that mixes registers, or lands at the wrong point on that spectrum, alienates the reader even if every word is technically correct. A legal document, a marketing campaign, and a community newsletter each require something very different.

One of the most immediate markers of register in Afrikaans is the second-person pronoun: the formal u and the informal jy/jou are not interchangeable, and choosing between them requires judgement about the social distance between writer and reader, the purpose of the document, and the conventions of the context. The Stellenbosch University Language Centre notes that opinions on the correct choice diverge even among skilled translators, and that erring toward the wrong form can draw complaints from readers and undermine the credibility of the communication. AI tools translate the English “you” as a single undifferentiated form, because English makes no such distinction. As such, you’ll receive a translation that is grammatically correct but tonally wrong. And in a client communication or official document, that is a failure that matters.

Technical content demands precision. A mistranslated term can change the meaning of an entire clause, and in legal, medical, or academic documents the consequences can be serious. A 2026 study published in LitNet Akademies, investigated ChatGPT-4o’s technical translation quality from English into Afrikaans at both expert and lay reader levels. Based on an honours research project, the study indicated that while ChatGPT-4o showed some translation potential, human intervention remained essential to produce translations that effectively communicated with target readers. The errors that remain after AI translation are often precisely the ones that matter most.

Regional variation adds another layer of complexity. Afrikaans isn’t a monolith. The language of the Boland, the Namaqualand, and urban Cape Town differs in ways a native reader notices immediately. Standardised AI output doesn’t account for this.

And many of the most distinctive Afrikaans expressions have never appeared in published form, meaning AI systems trained on existing texts have no basis for handling them at all – a limitation that applies whether the translation is into or out of Afrikaans.

What about “hybrid” translation?

The industry is increasingly moving toward AI-generated first drafts refined by a human editor. In some contexts, this can be practical, but for high-stakes content, legal documents, published material, and client-facing communications, the human element isn’t a finishing touch. It’s the entire point. An AI draft of a complex Afrikaans document can take longer to fix properly than starting the translation from scratch, and a hasty edit often produces text that reads as neither fully human nor fully coherent.

What goes unacknowledged in the enthusiasm for AI efficiency is the human cost. The UK Society of Authors’ 2024 survey found that 36% of translators had already lost work due to generative AI, and 43% reported that their income had decreased as a result – a pattern documented among South African freelance writers and translators as well, as reported in a LitNet article by Karin Schimke which indicates income losses of more than half since generative AI became mainstream in 2023. The skills and cultural knowledge those professionals carry don’t disappear when they can no longer earn a living from them, but they become harder to find and harder to pass on. Commissioning quality human translation means supporting the expertise that makes genuine cross-language communication possible.

Transparency matters too. As stated by Nicol Stassen from Protea Boekhuis in the Oosthuizen article: disclosing AI involvement in a translation isn’t optional – withholding it is dishonest.

Tips for anyone commissioning translation work

1. Know what you need. A straight translation and content adapted for a specific audience require different levels of creative and cultural input.
2. Provide context. The more a translator understands about purpose, audience, and tone, the better the result. A phrase that works in a legal document may be entirely wrong in a community newsletter.
3. Be cautious about machine translation for anything that matters. For getting the gist of something, fine. For client-facing, published, or formally submitted work, human expertise is essential. When translating from Afrikaans into English, AI tools may misidentify Afrikaans as Dutch, producing output that is wrong from the outset. When translating from English into Afrikaans, the risks are different but equally real: AI could produce anglicisms instead of correct Afrikaans idioms or split compound words that must be written as one.
4. When using AI translation, ask a native speaker to review the output. Native speakers catch subtleties that even strong translators sometimes miss.
5. Don’t underestimate your reader. Afrikaans speakers notice immediately when a text has been machine-translated. Awkward phrasing and unnatural word choices look unprofessional and signal that not enough care was taken. That impression sticks.

Translation as a form of respect

At its core, translation is an act of respect. It says: your language matters, your audience matters, and communicating clearly and authentically in your language is worth the effort.

As noted by Oosthuizen on LitNet, AI can construct sentences, but it doesn’t understand silence. It can transfer meaning, but it can’t carry feeling. It can approximate vocabulary, but it can’t navigate the idiom, structure, and cultural grain of a language the way someone who has lived inside it can. Translation, at its best, is an act of empathy, of listening, feeling, and choosing. For Afrikaans especially, with all its layered history and cultural texture, this remains a human skill.

Getting translation right isn’t just a quality issue, it’s a trust issue.

KD Language Services offers professional English and Afrikaans translation and revision. Contact us today to discuss your next project.