Why Google Translate isn't enough for an IEP.

Machine translation is fast, cheap, and increasingly good at routine prose. For a newsletter, a school-event flyer, or a website widget, it's a defensible workflow when paired with light human review.

For IEPs, procedural safeguards, evaluation reports, prior written notice, consent forms, and discipline letters — it isn't. The errors machine translation makes on specialized terminology, on legal phrasing, on conditional language, and on culturally specific concepts are the exact errors that invalidate consent and create due-process exposure.

• Specialized terminology drifts. "Least restrictive environment" doesn't have a clean cognate in most languages and will be rendered as something close-but-wrong by an MT system.
• Conditional and procedural language collapses. "If the parent does not consent, the district may proceed only by..." routinely loses its conditional structure in MT output.
• Acronyms get translated literally. BIP, FBA, FAPE, IFSP, PWN — all rendered as if they were words.
• Culture-bound concepts get flattened. "Parental consent" implies a specific procedural posture in U.S. law that doesn't translate cleanly into systems where parental authority works differently.
• The output looks fluent. Which is the problem. A district reviewer who doesn't read the target language sees a document that looks correct, and signs off.

The Center for Democracy and Technology's October 2025 brief found 60% of special-education teachers reported using AI tools in IEP-related work in 2024-25. The brief warned that uncritical use can violate IDEA's individualization requirements and FERPA's privacy requirements — particularly when teachers paste student PII into general-purpose AI tools.

The right answer isn't "no AI." It's "AI as drafting assist, with human translator review and FERPA-aligned tooling." That's what we do.

• School newsletters, general announcements
• Website copy that's reviewed by a human in the loop
• Routine appointment reminders
• Informational content with no legal effect on the family

For these, machine-translation post-editing (MTPE) at a lower price point is a reasonable workflow. We offer it. Districts know which workflow they're buying.