Lessons from Haitian Heritage Month
By Marleen Julien
I have a complicated relationship with AI.
Some days I love it. Some days I hate what it is doing to my industry.
This year, I have been getting more and more requests for MTPE — machine translation post-editing. That means the client runs the text through a machine first, then asks a human translator to clean it up. I have turned down a lot of those requests, not because I am against AI.
I am not.
I use it almost every day. I even used it as a co-builder to launch a project that meant a lot to me: HaitianHeritage.com a five-week web experience for Haitian Heritage Month.
The site went through forty-nine versions before launch. AI helped with most of them. But it did not get the story right on its own.
That is the part I want to talk about.
Most people hear "AI" and think of tools like ChatGPT writing homework, generating images, or creating viral content.
That is the loudest version of AI. But it is not the only one.
The version I worked with helped me finally build something I had been carrying in my head for years: a permanent online home for Haitian Heritage Month. Cultural. Educational. Free.
The site included a thirty-one-day Word of the Day series, a Kreyòl-narrated children's story called Ti Papiyon Ak Flè Yo, and vocabulary cards tracing words back to their Taíno, African, and European roots.
For years, I have also been trying to build my Haitian Kreyòl learning platform, CreoleLink.
I spent thousands of dollars on developers and designers. I sat through meeting after meeting. I wrote and rewrote specs.
Again and again, the result was close, but not what I meant.
Even when I hired a Haitian company, thinking shared language and culture would close the gap, it did not. They built what I described. Not what I meant. AI changed that.
With it as a build partner, I could test an idea, see it, reject it, revise it, and try again fast. For a small business owner, that kind of speed is not just convenient. It can be the difference between an idea staying in your head and an idea that actually exists.
What We Kept Human
The content is ours.
AI helped organize and present it. It did not create the expertise behind it.
The voices are ours too. We tried text-to-speech early on. It sounded like a French speaker trying to speak Kreyòl. The vowels were wrong. The rhythm was wrong. The feeling was wrong.
So Jasmin Larose and I recorded everything ourselves, the Word of the Day audio, the glossary, the narration. We spent our weekends recording. It was tiring, but it was not negotiable. Because when you build something for your own community, people can feel the difference.
AI can help you move faster. But it cannot care for you.
This is the part most people skip.
AI helped me build faster, but it also made mistakes that mattered.
It altered the Haitian national hymn, introducing errors into text that was already correct. It weakened properly written Kreyòl after "editing" it, mixing in French where it did not belong, bleu instead of ble, reté instead of rete.
It reduced "Kongo" to something generic, stripping away a complex civilization in a single careless definition.
And then there was the framing of Haitian history as beginning in 1492 as if the Indigenous and African story did not exist before Columbus arrived.
None of these errors would have stopped the site from launching. Most visitors might not have noticed. But a Haitian reader would have felt it.
That is the lesson. AI without expertise can produce work that looks right, and still be wrong in the places that matter most.
Most of the time, MTPE is not about quality. It is about lowering the cost of human expertise after the machine has already made decisions about meaning, tone, grammar, culture, and context.
For Haitian Kreyòl, that is risky. A machine can produce something that looks fluent while flattening the language, mixing in French, or stripping out cultural meaning.
The output is getting better, I can admit that. But sometimes, the fastest and most accurate path is still to start from scratch.
I am not against AI. I am against the idea that speed should matter more than truth.
This was my first major AI project. I learned a lot, and I still have more to learn.
If you are a small business owner, educator, advocate, or community leader, AI can be one of the most powerful tools available to you. But the real question is not whether to use it. It is how to use it without losing what makes your work yours.
Forty-nine versions is not failure. Sometimes it is proof that you cared more than the tool did.
I built HaitianHeritage.com to create a space where my son, and others like him can experience our story with depth, beauty, and care.
AI helped me build it forty-nine times. I am the reason it is true.
Explore More
If you want to learn more about Haiti’s history, language, and culture, I invite you to explore the full experience we created for Haitian Heritage Month.
You will find stories, vocabulary, audio, and resources designed to honor Haiti with accuracy and care, not just quick facts.
Discover the thirty-one-day Word of the Day series, listen to Haitian Kreyòl narrated content for children and adults, and explore how Taíno, African, and European influences shaped the language and culture we know today. Whether you are an educator, a community leader, or simply curious about Haiti, it is a space built to deepen understanding and connection.
Begin the journey here: Visit HaitianHeritage.com.
At Creole Solutions, We Care
We are not just translators or interpreters. We are guardians of a living language.
Every word we touch carries history, Taíno roots, Haitians rhythms, the resilience of a people who built something extraordinary from nothing. We know that culture. We live it. And we bring that depth to every project we take on.
That is why we do not just translate Haitian Kreyòl. We honor it, protect it, and help it thrive.
Header Photo by Maybeline Despagne / Pix City Studio