HTLGI (Human Translation (unassisted by any technology))
A tongue-in-cheek term for translation performed entirely by a human, without any computational or automated assistance.
HTLGI is not a standard term in the modern software localization industry. It comes from early machine translation research and appears today mostly in academic or historical writing. You will rarely encounter the acronym in commercial localization tools or workflows.
The term is attributed to computational linguist Martin Kay, who used it in his 1980 paper “The Proper Place of Men and Machines in Language Translation.” Kay positioned HTLGI as one end of a spectrum describing how translation work can be divided between people and computers. The other end was FAHQT, Yehoshua Bar-Hillel’s term for Fully Automatic High Quality Translation, a goal Bar-Hillel himself argued was unachievable at that time. Everything practical sits somewhere between the two.
The humor was deliberate. Calling fully manual translation “like God intended” pokes at the romantic view that real translation belongs to humans alone, while acknowledging that almost no one actually works that way. Translators rely on dictionaries, term bases, reference material, and CAT tools, which means strict HTLGI has been more of a thought experiment than a working method for decades.
🌍 Where the term stands today #️⃣
The spectrum Kay described still exists, but the midpoints have multiplied. Modern localization choices range from raw machine translation, to human-assisted machine translation, to machine translation post-editing, to professional human translation with full CAT support. None of these qualify as HTLGI in the strict sense because every step involves tooling of some kind.
The label still shows up occasionally as shorthand for the purely human end of the continuum, usually in essays about MT history or in debates about how much of the translator’s work AI should take over. It is also a useful reminder that “human translation” in a commercial context almost always means a human working with tools, not a human working alone.
🌐 For the practical end of the spectrum, see Localazy’s human translation services.
