The scenario
Northmoor is an American university with a Spanish-speaking applicant population, principally Mexican. Five pages on this site are translation targets: one program, two news items, one department and Student Life.
Machine translation will produce Spanish. What it produces by default is frequently Peninsular Spanish — the variety spoken in Spain — which reads to a Mexican applicant roughly the way British university admissions copy reads to an American one. Recognizable, and not written for them.
Try this
Translate the MS in Marine Mammal Science program page into Spanish.
Then examine the output against the markers below.
What to look for
The first pass typically comes back Peninsular. These are the tells:
| If you see this | It came back es-ES | It should be |
|---|---|---|
| vosotros, os | Spain | ustedes, les |
| grado (meaning a bachelor's degree) | Spain | licenciatura |
| máster | Spain | maestría |
| asignatura | Spain | materia |
| ordenador | Spain | computadora |
| 3,5 (decimal comma) | Spain | 3.5 |
The vocabulary markers matter more than they look. A Spanish reader can decode computadora without difficulty. A Mexican applicant reading grado where they expect licenciatura will misjudge what they are applying to — the words name different things in the two systems.
Vosotros is the fastest way to fail this demonstration. Mexico does not use it. One occurrence is enough.
Then correct it
Apply the language variant context item and translate again. The corrected pass should use licenciatura, maestría, materia, and ustedes throughout, with a decimal point rather than a comma.
What you should see. A demonstrable, checkable difference — not an impression that the second version reads better. Each marker in the table above either appears or does not.
Why this is the right demo
Because it is the kind of error a monolingual reviewer cannot catch and an AI system can be told to respect. A reviewer who does not speak Spanish sees two Spanish pages. A reviewer who does sees one page addressed to their audience and one that is not.
What is not translated
The institution name, course codes, and the vessel name R/V Cascadia Strait all stay as they are. Department and program names are translated with the English in parentheses on first use, because an applicant has to match the Spanish page to an English application form.