This article explores the process of involving cultural and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities in attempts to improve the quality and effectiveness of community translations, with special attention paid to feedback received from CALD lay-readers in attempts to ameliorate translations. Through corpus analysis of healthcare and legal aid documents translated from English to Mandarin, the authors in this study analyse the complexities of reaching pragmatic equivalence in translations based on a set of pre-established criteria. What is at stake in these examples is that they occasionally result in cases of pragmalinguistic failures that can be termed ‘contextual distortions’.