KLM sent me an email today. My flight was cancelled and rebooked.
The information was all there. But the message did not do its job in the right order.
The email followed this order: Apology. Cancelled flight. Old itinerary. Rebooking notice. New itinerary. Refund option. Additional information.
By the end, I could understand what happened.
But I had to reconstruct the message myself.
The purpose of this email was simple: Your flight changed. We already rebooked you. Here is your new itinerary. If this does not work, you can cancel and request a refund.
That is the content intent.
Not the English source structure. Not the order of the original template. Not the apology convention. The job of the message.
Large companies rarely write these emails from scratch each time.
They usually rely on templates: a cancellation notice, an apology, the old itinerary, the new itinerary, refund instructions, baggage information, passenger rights. Those pieces may already exist in multiple languages, translated by humans, machines, or both, and reused whenever the system needs them.
That is efficient. It is also where the problem begins.
If each piece is treated as a reusable translation unit, the email can look complete while the message logic remains unchecked. Every sentence may have a translation. Every section may contain the right information. But the final email can still fail to answer the most important question in the right order.
This email reads like it was assembled from reusable language parts, rather than designed as one complete message.
The result is not unreadable. That is exactly why it matters.
It is readable enough to pass as a translation. But it is not designed around what the message needs to accomplish.
Intent-based generation starts before the sentence.
It asks: what is this message supposed to do?
In this case, the message is supposed to reduce uncertainty after a flight cancellation. It should tell the passenger the outcome first, then the details, then the available option.
A clearer version would start like this: Your flight has changed. We have already booked a new flight for you. Your new itinerary is below. If the new itinerary does not work for you, you can cancel your trip and request a refund from your booking page.
Then the old itinerary can appear as reference. Then the apology can appear. Then baggage, refunds, and passenger rights can follow.
The information does not need to disappear. It needs to be ordered by intent.
This is why the problem is not translation quality.
A sentence-level translation can be correct and still fail the message. A localized email can contain all the right information and still make the reader work too hard to understand what happened.
Intent-based localization does not ask, "How do we translate this English email?"
It asks, "What must this email accomplish in Japanese?"
Once that is clear, the Japanese is no longer carrying the weight of a source text that was never designed for this moment.