Why word-for-word translation lands wrong
Most free translators work at the level of the phrase. Each chunk is matched to its most probable equivalent and the pieces are stitched back together, which is fine for a railway timetable and wrong for anything a person actually wrote. Meaning sits above the phrase, not inside it.
Take “I will get back to you”. Pushed word by word into Hindi it promises that you are coming back to where the reader is standing, which is not what anybody said. “The ball is in your court” arrives as a sentence about sport. Every word is right and the message is gone.
So the unit here is the sentence and what it is doing, not the phrase inside it. That line comes back as the ordinary Hindi for replying later, because that is what an office in Pune would say. The literal words are dropped. The commitment survives.
Why register matters more than vocabulary
Register is the setting that decides how a sentence sounds rather than what it means. The Hindi of a leave application, an RTI request or a letter to a landlord leans on a Sanskritised vocabulary and a built-in distance. The Hindi you use with a cousin shares almost none of it.
Pronouns carry most of the weight. Hindi gives you aap, tum and tu; Tamil has neenga and nee; Bengali has apni, tumi and tui. Pick one level too low in an email to a professor at Delhi University and the sentence reads as rude, though nothing in it is incorrect.
Tamil splits further. Written Tamil and spoken Tamil are close to two registers of the same language, and spoken Tamil typed into a college application looks careless where written Tamil in a WhatsApp message reads like a news bulletin. Set the register and the whole output moves, not a few polite words.
Where you should not use this unchecked
There is text where a good translation is not good enough. A rent agreement, an employment contract, a discharge summary, a consent form, an insurance clause, a legal notice — anything that binds you or treats you. A clause that is ninety-five per cent right is still a clause you signed.
The failure is specific. Legal and medical writing runs on terms of art, words that look ordinary and are not — consideration, indemnity, without prejudice, shall against will, twice daily against every twelve hours. A translation that reaches for the everyday sense of those words changes the obligation while reading perfectly.
So use it to understand a document and to draft one, then hand anything with consequences to a fluent speaker before it goes out. Courts, visa offices and universities abroad usually want a certified translation from a registered translator, and this is not that. Read the names and figures back yourself.