Are AI translation suggestions worth keeping if they don't save time?

I would keep a tool that made a difficult afternoon less tiring, even if I finished at the usual time. I would not want that preference turned into evidence that I could take on more work. A 2026 paper, ‘Smarter edits?’, studied eight professional translators editing English-to-Dutch machine translations of news and biomedical texts. It compared ordinary editing with error highlights and suggested corrections. Six participants thought the correction suggestions made them faster, but the timed results showed no statistically significant average productivity gain. Overall translation quality also showed no significant difference. Individual results varied. That is a small study of particular systems and short texts, not proof that AI translation assistance never saves time. The baseline already involved machine translation; this was not AI versus translating from scratch. The suggestions were better received than highlights alone, and participants described them as more informative. That preference deserves attention without being relabeled as measured speed. For a translation team considering a similar feature, I would let people choose whether to use it and compare the time to a checked, deliverable text with their usual method. Ask separately whether the work felt easier. Those are checks I would propose, not additional findings from the paper. If someone prefers the tool but takes just as long, keep the workload assumption unchanged. Would you pay for an AI assistant that made the work more comfortable but did not get you home any earlier?