Why Your AI Translation is Hallucinating (And How to Fix It)

If you have ever tried to use AI for professional translation, you know the drill: you give it a massive list of instructions, and it starts out great… then it gets tired. It forgets your glossary, ignores your style guide, or starts hallucinating.

In our latest Crowdin Power Up episode, Dorota Pawlak and Stefan Huyghe looked at why this happens and how a new Crowdin app called AI Pipeline actually solves it by changing the way we talk to AI models.

We’re Overloading the AI

If you hand your worker a 50-page technical manual and shout 10 different formatting rules at them as they walk out the door, they’re going to miss something. It’s not that they aren’t capable, it’s just information overload.

This is exactly what happens in most AI translation workflows: we send a single giant request and expect perfection.

When AI is overloaded with too many instructions and too much context at once, it becomes unreliable and, frankly, hallucinates. It starts making things up just to finish the task.

Solution is The “Small Steps” Approach

Instead of sending one long prompt to AI, the AI Pipeline breaks the process into a sequence of tiny, specialized tasks. It’s a controlled sequence where the AI focuses on one thing at a time: translating, then checking itself, then fixing itself.

How the AI Pipeline Looks

You can build these pipelines in Crowdin from scratch or use templates. A typical “UI Localization” pipeline looks like this:

1. Context Extraction. AI “looks” at your screenshots first, so it actually knows what it’s translating.
2. Translation. Now AI has the context, it does the actual work.
3. Contextual Appropriateness Check. It double-checks that the tone is right and the terminology fits the specific domain.
4. Proofreading. A standard pass to fix typos, grammar, and tag placeholder issues.
5. Glossary Check. This is a separate, dedicated step just for your glossary terms. If the AI missed one earlier, it catches and fixes it here.
6. Crowdin QA Check. The final “sanity check” for omissions and making sure the text doesn’t break your UI length limits.

Why This Actually Works: Dutch & Polish Demos

Because the AI is only doing one thing at a time, it doesn’t forget your style guide halfway through.

We put this to the test with two different languages:

• Dutch: Dorota translated mobile app strings into Dutch to see if the AI could handle specific technical terms. Even with a short wait, the quality was “top-notch”. It nailed terms like “cool down” and “recovery mode” exactly as defined in the glossary.
• Polish: For an e-bike manual in Polish, the pipeline caught specific nuances that a standard AI request totally missed, like correctly translating “tap the button” according to a specific style guide instruction.

AI followed the prompts perfectly because it wasn’t distracted by 20 other instructions at once.

AI Pipeline Speed and Cost

Compared to Agentic AI, which is super fast, the AI Pipeline takes a few more minutes to process the request. But you’re trading those few minutes for a translation that actually follows your rules and has significantly fewer hallucinations.

Plus, it’s not more expensive. You only pay for the full translation on the first step; every step after that only charges for the small “differences” or corrections the AI makes.

Total Transparency in AI Pipeline Actions

With AI Pipeline Logs, you can see every single prompt, every correction, and even the exact token usage for every step. If a translation looks weird, you can go back and see exactly why the engine chose that word. That helps to adjust your prompt or add new details to your style guide.

Check out the full episode of Crowdin Power Up about the AI Pipeline: