Why Live Translators Get Names Wrong, and How to Get Them Through

Which? asked bilingual speakers to test Apple's Live Translation in 2026. The translations were mostly accurate, but the feature got muddled with names: it turned "British Airways" into "Briti shareway". Which? noted that is not great if you are asking for directions. Every live translator has this weak spot, and it is not the translation that usually fails. It is the hearing.

Where names break

1. Hearing: the recognizer picks common words. Live translation first turns speech into text. A recognizer chooses the most likely words for the sounds it hears, and names lose that contest. Google's own documentation for its speech recognition says words such as proper names are rare in general use, and gives restaurant names as an example of words less likely to be chosen. Noise and an unfamiliar accent make it worse. "British Airways" said quickly sounds like other words, and the recognizer writes those.

2. Translating: the name is treated as a word. If the text is right, the translator can still go wrong. A person's name that is also an ordinary word can be translated as the word. Names from one script are also written many ways in another: Muhammad is also written Mohammed, Mohamed, Mohammad and more, one of the highest numbers of English spelling variants of any name, so a correct name can come out in a spelling the person never uses.

3. Speaking: the voice says what it was given. The translated voice reads the text it receives. It cannot fix a name that was misheard two steps earlier. For how the steps fit together, see speech-to-speech translation explained.

Eight habits that get names through

1. Pause before and after the name. A short pause gives the recognizer a clean boundary instead of a name blurred into the words around it.

2. Say what it is. "The airline British Airways", "Doctor Faisal", "the town of Murree". The extra word tells the recognizer what kind of word comes next, and tells the listener a name is coming.

3. Do not rush the name. People say their own names fast because they say them every day. Say it at the speed you would use for a stranger.

4. Read the transcript, not only the translation. If the captions of what you said have the name wrong, the translation has it wrong too. Repeat it before the conversation moves on.

5. Give the tool context if it lets you. Some tools accept a topic or a list of words in advance. Google's Speech-to-Text lets developers add words and phrases so they are recognized more often. In Mingle, see below.

6. Use the right mode for specialist words. Medicine and product names are names too. A tool with a specialist mode for the subject has the words it is likely to hear.

7. Put exact things in writing. Addresses, flight numbers, medicines, account names and spellings: write them down or show them on a screen. A live translator is for the conversation around them.

8. Use a professional for high stakes. For medical and legal decisions, a professional interpreter checks names and terms in a way no live tool does today.

What Mingle does with names

Mingle has an optional Session topic field when you set up a session. Up to 200 characters of it are passed to the speech recognizer as context for the whole session. The field's help text suggests words like "doctor visit" or "business meeting"; you can also add the names you expect, for example "Meeting with Dr. Faisal Qureshi about the Lahore office". We have not measured how much this improves names, so try it with your own before you rely on it.

The session also has conversation modes: General conversation, Technical / IT, and Pharmacy / medication. The last two add word lists for their subject, which covers many product and medicine names. The captions show what was heard as people speak, so a misheard name is visible before anyone acts on it.

For transparency: Mingle is our product. We have not published accuracy figures, for names or anything else, and Mingle mishears names too. The habits above work with any live translator.

Sources

Checked on 27 October 2026.

• Which?: We tested Apple's Live Translation feature: does it really work? (28 July 2026)
• Google Cloud: Improve transcription results with model adaptation
• Wikipedia: Muhammad (name)