English Pages Need English Content── Unless the target for a language edition is written out as a list of units, AI translates the frame and leaves the substance in the original language

01An English page still carried a Japanese video

In September 2026 the operator opened one of the English pages of a site built with AI. The headings were in English. The body text was in English. The video embedded in that page was not: it still spoke Japanese and carried Japanese subtitles. The operator asked the AI to rebuild the video in English for the English page, and limited the fix to a single day's material.

Anyone running a site in two languages meets this. The request for an English edition usually travels as a single verb: translate. An AI applies that verb to the things it can translate. Strings change. Video does not.

One pattern can be taken from this. State the target for a language edition as a list of units to be translated, and state it before the work starts. Otherwise the frame is translated and the substance stays in the original language. The operator did two things: named the material that had been left behind, and cut the repair down to one day.

02The frame was translated and the substance stayed behind

A page is not a single fabric. Part of it is easy to translate, and part of it has to be rebuilt.

The easy part is body text, headings, button labels, navigation. These are strings, so a machine can swap them. The part that needs rebuilding is audio, subtitles, text burned into diagrams, text photographed inside an image, table headers that exist only as pictures. None of these can be pulled out as strings.

So when an English edition is reported as finished, sometimes only the first half is finished. The second half sits untouched inside an English frame. To a reader, the page opens in English and then, at the part that took the most work to make, turns into a language they cannot read.

03Substance left in the original language leaves the edition useless to its readers

An English edition exists to reach people who read English. A frame in English does almost none of that. The reader enters on an English surface and runs into material they cannot use. A page openly marked as Japanese would have been kinder.

The damage is not only to reading. It reaches search as well. Google's documentation for localized versions explicitly covers sites that keep the main content in one language and translate only the template, such as navigation and footer. The case is treated as a known shape, not a defect. Turn that around and the consequence is plain: an English frame over Japanese substance carries no guarantee of being served to English readers.

Assistive technology is affected too. The World Wide Web Consortium requires that the default human language of a page be programmatically determinable, so that screen readers can load the right pronunciation rules. Material in another language, sitting inside a page declared as English, will not be spoken correctly.

04A language edition means a reader can finish in one language

Set the target explicitly. A language edition holds when someone who reads only that language can take in the page from beginning to end. The measure is reception, not the share of words translated.

Draw the boundary as well. Proper names, product names and the formal titles of laws are not translated, because translating them produces a different thing. W3C's internationalization guidance shows the same care with markup: the name of a language in that language itself should be left alone. Separating the units to translate from the units to leave shortens the request considerably.

05In multilingual promotional material, diagrams and video are the last to change

The same thing happens with pharmaceutical material. A deck written in Japanese goes out in English. Body text and tables get translated. Axis labels inside charts, small print in footnotes and the audio of a training video tend to stay in the original language, for the simple reason that none of them are strings.

For material review, that residue is a source of missed errors. Translated sentences can be compared line by line. Text inside an image has to be read by eye. This is also the point at which a corrected source document sits beside an uncorrected figure.

Regulators treat this volume of work as real. The European Medicines Agency publishes standard headings and statements for product information in the official languages of the European Union plus Icelandic and Norwegian, and runs a separate linguistic review of the translated texts. The design assumes two distinct costs: translating, and then checking the translation. A company producing its own English edition needs someone holding that second step, or the result will not be the same.

06AI translates the frame because the request counted only the frame

An AI infers the scope of a job from the words of the request. "Make an English edition" contains no list of units. A language model can reliably act on strings, so strings are acted on. Video and diagrams are a different task with different tools. Unasked, that task does not begin.

There is a second reason: no finishing condition was given. Anthropic's published prompting guidance is direct on this point, advising that instructions be explicit and specific about the desired result. The phrase "English edition" carries the target inside the requester's head, not inside the text. A target that is never written down is never transmitted.

The repair, then, is not a rebuke. It is stating the gap between the target and the current state in countable form. That is what the operator did: name the kind of material that had been left in place, specify the action of rebuilding it in English, and fence the scope to one day.

07Count the units, then verify on a single day's output

Four steps.

1. Count the units to translate. Body text, headings, navigation, video audio, subtitles, text inside images, page descriptions. Attach the list to the request.
2. Decide the units not to translate. Proper names, product names, formal legal titles. Draw the boundary first.
3. Write the finishing condition in one sentence. A reader of that language alone can take in the page from beginning to end. Not a percentage.
4. Verify on a fenced scope. Repair one day, or one page, confirm nothing is left behind, and only then widen.

The fourth step carries the weight. Repair everything at once and there is no way to confirm the repair. One day's output can be opened and seen. The operator limited the fix to a single day not merely to reduce the labour, but to keep the result small enough to verify.