A sentence can sound fluent.
Its grammar can be clean, its vocabulary plausible and its tone completely assured.
Fluency shows knowledge.
It can show that someone knows the words, the rules or the expected equivalent. That matters, but it is only a beginning.
Knowledge does not prove understanding.
A person, institution or machine can produce convincing language without grasping the person, context or consequence behind it.
A distance can open between the two.
On one side sits what the language appears to say. On the other sits what has actually been understood.
False Fluency names the confident mistake.
It describes fluent output being accepted as proof of understanding and used as if nothing important could be missing.
The gap is widened in recognisable ways.
Three mechanisms organise the theory. Each gives confidence a different route past the available understanding.
Bias decides what gets priority.
Assumptions, stereotypes and institutional aims influence what a translation keeps, edits, domesticates or leaves out.
Read the Bias mechanismMetacognitive failure hides the limit.
If we do not examine how well we understand, confidence can survive long after the evidence for it has run out.
See where this mechanism sitsMissing knowledge can still sound complete.
Gaps in specialist, cultural, contextual or source-language knowledge can produce confident, incomplete readings.
See where this mechanism sitsFluent error can become legal fact.
An interpretation enters the record, and the record can shape credibility even when the original words were never preserved.
Follow the asylum case fileA machine can return the words and miss the person.
Language technology may produce accurate-looking text while losing tone, dialect, hesitation, idiom and rapport.
Read the language technology caseA translation can become the whole text.
Students may learn one English rendering fluently while the source and the translator's choices remain out of view.
Open the Classics case fileStart with the gap. Then inspect how it was made.
The complete framework connects False Fluency to its mechanisms and to the case files where the consequences become visible.
Enter the False Fluency frameworkOne central gap. Three mechanisms that widen it.
False Fluency is the parent concept. Bias, lack of metacognitive awareness and knowledge deficits explain how confidence can outrun understanding.
Four case files, each testing a different kind of confidence.
The Words I Had to Leave Behind
This talk is where I first set out the question that became Translational Justice: what do people have to leave behind to be understood?
Watch on YouTubeTwo pieces on interpreting and credibility.
Interpretation Failure in the UK Asylum System
Three reforms: independently accredited interpreters, original-language testimony retained beside the English record, and AI operating on what the applicant actually said.
Asylum, Singlish, AI and Classics.
Four places where translation choices affect a hearing, a keyboard, a model or a classroom.
Enter the record-making process.
A WebXR simulation of an asylum hearing where your words pass through interpretation and into a record you cannot control.
Enter simulation FieldworkConversations with people inside the process.
Anonymised field notes from lawyers, interpreters, standards bodies, scholars and refugees.
Read field notes WritingEssays, papers and public work.
Longer arguments on procurement, Singlish particles, AI language hierarchies and translation loss.
Browse writing