Checking AI-drafted Turkish: a proofreading checklist for hotel messages and texts

Proofreading AI generated text means checking a draft against the hotel's own register, vocabulary, form and facts, not only its grammar. Fluent Turkish can still read as foreign: "sen" where a hotel says "siz", a translated idiom, a wrong suffix after a guest's name, a US date. Read every draft against a short house list before it leaves the hotel.

The pre-arrival email is spelled correctly, punctuated correctly, and does not sound like the hotel. It calls the guest "sen" in the second line, offers a check-in on "12/09", and mentions a late check-out nobody approved. Nothing is misspelled. Everything is slightly wrong. After reading this article, your team can run any AI draft through five groups of checks, each with a concrete fault and its fix, in about a minute.

Why does fluent Turkish still read as foreign?#

Because fluency is grammar, while naturalness is register, vocabulary, form and facts, and a language model is optimized for the first. A guest does not notice an error; they notice that the message does not sound like the hotel that signed it.

A model produces statistically common Turkish, which sits closer to a general news or blog voice than to a front desk answering a guest at 23.00. Four fault families cover almost everything: register (who is speaking to whom), words (which term for which thing), form (suffixes, apostrophes, dates, numbers) and facts (names, dates, prices, promises). A fifth fault is invisible to a language check: the draft promises something the hotel never agreed to, such as a free upgrade or a flexible cancellation.

Spelling and grammar tools check the sentence, not the relationship with the guest and not the reservation behind it, so they pass all five families. The working rule is ownership: the person who sends the message owns it, and the tool only drafts it.

The check is not a rewrite. Most drafts need three or four small corrections, and the same ones recur, which is why a fixed list beats a careful mood.

Is the draft addressing the guest the way your hotel does?#

A hotel speaks to a guest with "siz", and a draft that slips into "sen", or mixes both in one message, reads as either rude or careless. Check the pronouns and the verb endings that carry them.

Turkish second person lives in the verb ending, not only in the pronoun: "gelebilir misiniz" against "gelebilir misin". Imperatives are the sharpest of all: write "Bilgi verin", never "Bilgi ver". "Sen" is defensible only when the guest used it first or the brand is explicitly informal, and the choice must hold across the pre-arrival email, the guest app message and the review reply.

Greetings and closings are house decisions: "Sayın misafirimiz" or "Değerli misafirimiz" at the top, "Saygılarımızla" at the bottom, with the hotel, the person and the department in the signature. Address by title and full name ("Sayın Ahmet Yılmaz"), never by first name unless the guest invited it.

English politeness markers arrive translated and bloated: "We would like to inform you that" becomes "Sizi bilgilendirmek isteriz ki", where the hotel would simply state the thing. Sentence length is part of register too: English drafts carry long subordinate clauses, while a front desk message reads better as two or three short sentences.

Mixing is the most common single fault: one paragraph in "siz", the next in "sen", because the model drifted mid-draft. The same discipline applies when the draft is a review reply, as covered in AI-drafted replies to hotel reviews: a workflow with a person in charge.

Which words give away that a machine wrote it?#

The giveaway is usually a term the hotel never uses, or an English idiom carried over word for word. Fix the vocabulary and most drafts stop sounding translated.

One term for one concept, held through the whole message: "misafir hesabı (folyo)", "giriş (check-in)", "çıkış (check-out)", "kat hizmetleri", "oda fiyatı", "doluluk oranı". Keep three money words apart: a charge on the bill is "harcama", collecting a payment is "tahsilat", and the fiscal document is "fatura". A draft that writes "faturanız hesabınıza eklendi" has merged two different things.

Translated idioms do not survive: "when it bites", "low-hanging fruit" and "in the driver's seat" arrive word for word and mean nothing to a Turkish guest. Say what the sentence means in plain Turkish. Marketing vocabulary leaks in from the model's general voice: "sorunsuz", "kilidini açmak", "kaldıraç", "çığır açan". A hotel message needs none of them.

Passive chains are the other signature: "tarafınızdan gerçekleştirilecektir" becomes "sizden ... isteriz" or an active verb with a named subject. Count the "-mektedir" endings: one per message is plenty; three make the text sound like a regulation.

The practical test: would the front desk say this sentence out loud to a guest standing at the counter? If not, rewrite it. For translated messages to foreign guests, the same questions apply with a different set of faults, covered in AI translation for guest messages: when it is good enough and when it is not.

Are the suffixes, dates and numbers in Turkish form?#

Proper names take an apostrophe before the suffix, dates run day.month.year, thousands take a full stop and the percent sign comes before the number. These are mechanical checks, and they are the ones a reader spots first.

The apostrophe goes before the suffix on proper names: "AI Otel'in", "Türkiye'nin", "Ahmet Yılmaz'a". Institution names take none. The suffix itself follows vowel harmony and the last sound: "Ahmet'e", "Ayşe'ye", "Murat'a", "Su'ya". For an unusual name, check the Turkish Language Association spelling guide rather than guessing a rule.

Dates: 24.09.2026 in a table, a form or a voucher; "24 Eylül 2026" in running text, with the month capitalized. A draft that reformats a date can also shift it by a day, so compare it with the booking. Numbers: 63.917.057 with full stops for thousands, 65,2 with a comma for decimals, %6,8 with the sign first.

Money: the amount first, the currency after ("1.250 TL", "180 avro"), one currency per message, and a clear statement of which currency the guest will actually be charged in. Times and ranges: "14.00 ile 16.00 arası" or "14.00-16.00", never "2pm" and never "12/09" for a date.

Punctuation carried over from English: the em dash, the Oxford comma and straight quotes. Turkish uses “ ” and a colon or a comma where the draft put a dash.

Do the names, dates and prices match the booking?#

A draft is a claim about a real reservation, so every name, date, room type, price and inclusion is checked against the record, not against the draft. This is the group where a mistake costs money.

The four things a draft invents most easily: a late check-out, a free upgrade, an airport transfer and a breakfast time. None of them exists unless the rate plan or the reservation says so. Spell the guest's name from the passport or the reservation record, not from the email signature; a wrong name on a confirmation is a real problem at the desk.

Check the arrival and departure dates, the number of nights and the day of the week, because a reformatted date can move by a day without any warning. Check the price, the currency, what is included and the cancellation terms. A draft must never soften a policy: "ücretsiz iptal" on a non-refundable rate is a commitment the hotel will have to honor.

Decide who may promise what. An upgrade, a refund or a late check-out is an authority question, not a wording question, and the answer belongs on the house sheet. Sensitive messages (complaints, refunds, health, safety, anything about a child) get a second reader before they go out, however clean the draft looks. Keep the reservation number in the message or in the internal note, so the check can be repeated by someone else. The same discipline applies to reservation emails more broadly, covered in Drafting reservation emails with AI: faster replies without wrong promises.

How do you make the check fast enough to use every day?#

Read the draft aloud once, then keep a one-page house sheet that settles the choices a checker would otherwise debate every time. Speed comes from fixed decisions, not from a longer checklist.

Reading aloud catches mixed register, a translated idiom and a sentence that runs too long faster than the eye does, and it takes under a minute. The sheet fixes what recurs: the register line ("siz", never mixed), one greeting and one closing, a ten-term glossary for the things the hotel writes about most, the date and number formats, the currency wording and the signature block.

It also fixes authority: who may confirm an upgrade, a late check-out or a refund, and which messages need a second reader. Keep it to one page. A long style guide is not opened at 23.00 on a night shift, and an unopened guide changes nothing. Put the sheet where the draft is written: the reply template, the shared note, the message screen the team already uses.

Review it once a quarter, and add a line each time a guest replies with a question the message should have answered. Record the near misses: a wrong price caught before sending is a lesson for the sheet, not something to keep quiet. If your team is still learning to get good drafts in the first place, start from Writing prompts for hotel work: a simple method with examples.

What to do next#

Take the message your hotel sends most often, usually the pre-arrival email, and run one real draft through the five groups: register, words, form, facts, read aloud. The corrections you make will be the same next week, so write them onto the one-page sheet and the check shrinks to a minute. Fluent is where a draft starts; register, vocabulary, form and facts are what make it sound like the hotel wrote it.