diff --git a/CONTRIBUTING.md b/CONTRIBUTING.md
index ebf23acad114c34fc4a21ab27c127fccf8f08004..72af9ba72b76208071942e5d2cdbe0ee0f86a0d0 100644
--- a/CONTRIBUTING.md
+++ b/CONTRIBUTING.md
@@ -5,6 +5,8 @@ agree to a Contributor License Agreement (CLA) declaring that you have the right
 and actually do, grant us the rights to use your contribution. For details, visit
 https://cla.microsoft.com.
 
+> Important: when translating text in this repo, please ensure that you do not use machine translation. We will verify translations via the community, so please only volunteer for translations in languages where you are proficient.
+
 When you submit a pull request, a CLA-bot will automatically determine whether you need
 to provide a CLA and decorate the PR appropriately (e.g., label, comment). Simply follow the
 instructions provided by the bot. You will only need to do this once across all repositories using our CLA.
diff --git a/TRANSLATIONS.md b/TRANSLATIONS.md
index 01f2f139564f9458a51c4b022c12a36c30f866fc..7ffde887c16dd189146a279745fd5950c2bcb62f 100644
--- a/TRANSLATIONS.md
+++ b/TRANSLATIONS.md
@@ -2,6 +2,8 @@
 
 We welcome translations for the lessons in this curriculum!
 
+> Note, please do not use Google Translate or other machine translation tools for translations, but rather use your own proficiency and manually translate the files.
+
 ## Guidelines
 
 There are folders in each lesson folder and lesson introduction folder which contain the translated markdown files.
@@ -18,6 +20,8 @@ where _[language]_ is a two letter language abbreviation following the ISO 639-1
 
 Similar to Readme's, please translate the assignments as well.
 
+> Important: when translating text in this repo, please ensure that you do not use machine translation. We will verify translations via the community, so please only volunteer for translations in languages where you are proficient.
+
 **Quizzes**
 
 1. Add your translation to the quiz-app by adding a file here: https://github.com/microsoft/ML-For-Beginners/tree/main/quiz-app/src/assets/translations, with proper naming convention (en.json, fr.json). **Please don't localize the words 'true' or 'false' however. thanks!**