Vision
Vision
The Translator's Problem
When an agent books a flight or works through a healthcare portal for you, it converts what you want into what a system will accept. Those are two different languages, and conversion always costs something. Translators have spent centuries building precise vocabulary for that cost: what to preserve, what to sacrifice, whose interests win when fidelity to the speaker and conformity to the target pull apart. The vocabulary already exists. It maps onto agent design more closely than the people building agents seem to have noticed.
The Translator's Problem
When an agent books a flight or works through a healthcare portal for you, it converts what you want into what a system will accept. Those are two different languages, and conversion always costs something. Translators have spent centuries building precise vocabulary for that cost: what to preserve, what to sacrifice, whose interests win when fidelity to the speaker and conformity to the target pull apart. The vocabulary already exists. It maps onto agent design more closely than the people building agents seem to have noticed.
Two-Way Loss
What You Meant, Minus Everything That Didn't Fit the Form
Tell an agent to book a morning flight under $350 with a checked bag, and the instruction feels precise. The payment network that has to authorize the purchase can check the amount and the merchant. It cannot check "morning." Recent frameworks from Visa and the IMF show where a person's intent stops being verifiable, and who ends up resolving what's left over.
The Version of You That Arrives
Agents translate institutional offerings to people. They also run the other direction, converting a person's circumstances into data fields. When German parents on parental leave applied for a housing loan online, the form had no category for their situation, and a branch employee noticed and intervened. What happens when the intermediary is software, working at volume?
Loyalty's Real Question
A W3C draft published this week extends the browser's old loyalty obligation to AI agents: a user agent must serve its user's interests over its implementer's and over any other party's. Applied to commerce, this becomes a translation problem. When an agent converts "find me a hotel near the conference with flexible cancellation" into a ranked list, the filters it applies, the results it surfaces or buries, are translation choices the user never sees in their raw form. The draft requires agents to disclose sources and actions. But a ranking algorithm can be disclosed without being legible, the same way a financial prospectus technically tells you everything while communicating almost nothing. Who verifies the translation was faithful? The draft doesn't say.
Translation Sources
