Every translation Travel Buddy shows you is run through a two-direction cross-check before it lands on the page. When the check disagrees with itself, we say so instead of hiding the disagreement.
We translate your word into the target language with one engine, then translate the result back to your source language with a second engine and compare it to what you typed. Most of the time the round-trip agrees and the card ships unmodified. When it doesn't, the system reports what it found.
We also catch a separate failure: when the engine just writes your word in another alphabet letter-by-letter instead of translating it. Serbian Faith → Фаитх looks like a translation, but it isn't — it's the English word in Cyrillic letters. We flag those.
Faith → ItalianThe engine returns Fede, which back-translates to "Wedding ring." Both senses of fede exist in Italian — it can mean faith OR a wedding band — but the wrong-sense risk is real. Flagged uncertain.
Faith → SerbianThe engine returns Фаитх — the English word spelled out in Cyrillic, not the Serbian word for faith (Вера). Flagged unreliable.
Halal → PashtoThe engine returns هلال, which sounds right but back-translates to "the crescent" (the moon, not the religious term). Flagged uncertain.
Sarah → RussianThe engine returns Сара — a correct transliteration of the name. Phonetically matches. Marked as a name, not a translation.
Google Translate, DeepL, and every other tool will ship the Fede, Фаитх, and هلال outputs above with full confidence and no badge. They're optimized for confident answers. We're optimized for honest ones. If you're about to say something to a stranger in a country you don't live in, "we don't know" is more useful than "we said it confidently and we were wrong."
Hover the badge to see the back-translation. If it's a synonym of what you typed, the card is probably fine (German Glaube back-translates to "Believe" — close enough). If it's a different concept entirely (Italian Fede → "Wedding ring"), pick another phrasing or ask a local.
Romanization quality. The Latin-script pronunciation hints we show for Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, Khmer, and Burmese are exactly what the upstream translation engine returns — often vowel-stripped and unpronounceable. We're working on this next.