Candidates taking the examination for sworn translators in Poland are not permitted to use computers or the internet. Only in the written part may they consult paper dictionaries and encyclopaedias. Artificial intelligence is therefore not an option. If, however, it were allowed, would passing the written examination become trivially easy and take only a few minutes instead of four hours, given that this is roughly the time AI typically needs to translate four texts totalling about 7,000 characters including spaces?

This article discusses the results achieved by an AI system when translating one of the texts from the examination for sworn translators of English.

The errors it made are compared with those made by human candidates in order to determine the current level of AI translation competence in relation to that of candidates and to assess whether it would have any chance of achieving a pass.

The results indicate that the AI translation surpasses that of many candidates in terms of both linguistic and content accuracy, and that this translation would highly likely be approved by the examination board.