Reference-free translation audits have little to work with when a survey answer is only one or two words long. A translation may be reasonable and still be nearly impossible to reconnect to its source among thousands of similar answers. We examined this problem in 44,118 Portuguese–English response pairs from 14,706 survey-specific respondent records across four workplace surveys. One third of the pairs addressed mental health or well-being. Our analysis kept duplicate-aware retrieval, COMETKiwi quality estimates, language identification, and affective-lexicon coverage separate because they answer different questions. The retrieval encoder found the paired target or an exact normalized duplicate at rank one for 71.80% of English queries and 73.37% of Portuguese queries overall. Response length changed the picture. Rank-one recovery ranged from 8.39–12.96% for one- or two-word answers to 98.45–99.08% for answers longer than 20 words. COMETKiwi scores did not rise steadily with length, and about one quarter of responses in either language contained no emotion term covered by the lexicons. A failed match therefore does not, by itself, identify a poor translation. For brief and repetitive survey text, reference-free audits should report how distinguishable the response is and how much of it the diagnostic resources cover.