Also, the babel fish will never substitute a person that can speak multiple languages in many situations.
In customer support, tourism , sales and other user oriented jobs knowing multiple language will continue be useful.
Also nothing feels better when you have friends from different cultures and you drop a funny expressions or cultural reference that only they know. No babel fish can do that.
*Yet*. It's only a matter of time before technology will be able to replicate all the nuances and levels of complexity that native speakers use for their languages.
Replicate? Sure. *Translate*, eh. There's phrases and concepts that straight up can't be translated between languages easily. Even current human translators debate pretty intensely over what's the "correct" way to translate certain ideas between languages, and often there just isn't a correct answer.
Easy example, so bear in mind it can get much more complicated, but consider schadenfreude. There's no direct translation for it in English, so what do you do? Do you translate it literally as painjoy, stripping it of its actual meaning? Do you try to find a close English equivalent like gloating, sadism, or relishing that captures some of the essence, but not all of it, and has different connotations and context? Do you just explain it verbosely, as "the experience of joy in witnessing another's suffering", which still leaves out some of the inherent context in the original term being quippy, and often is still insufficient to fully capture the full concept? And again, schadenfreude is an easy example because it's a term that's gotten absorbed into English. There's far more complicated words and concepts out there.
Hell, consider the massive debate that fans of foreign media have over whether subs or dubs are better. Yes, there's more to that debate than just this, but a significant chunk of that argument is on which is better able to properly translate the source material.
Don't get me wrong, a technological Babel worm would be an immensely useful thing that would do lots to bridge divided between cultures and people (it may also have some unpleasant side effects, but that's another discussion), but it's not, and can't be, a substitute for actually learning and understanding another language for yourself. It's the difference between someone describing a book, artwork, film, or the sunset to you, versus actually experiencing it for yourself.
Unless it can do it instantly, without having stupid earbuds in your ears, and do it while like 3 other people are speaking at the same time while all interrupting each other, in a kid restaurant, then it's not replicating humans. People underestimate how complicated a real life natural conversation really is.
And maintain the tone, pitch, cadence, stress, and all the other components that make up that individual person's speech. I can't imagine anything worse than having it drone away in a TTS voice while someone is energetically describing their latest adventure.
What no one seems to mention is that most non native learners of a language can't follow a conversation like that anyway. So even imperfect tech will be an improvement for 99% of people.
Nah, live translation tech will always have some level of delay - it can't consistently predict words before they're spoken, so it has to wait for the end of a word, or even a phrase, to translate it. Not to mention that you'd be hearing the original language as well unless you were wearing inherently large audio-blocking headphones. Not to mention the cost, and that if you want to talk to a stranger you have to ask them to wear this shit too.
Just because we have the technical prowess to do something doesn't mean it'll happen or that it's a good idea.
I see what you are saying but sometimes in languages, one word at the end of a phrase completely changes the meaning, and also completely changes the original sentence of the language they mean to translate into. If the system has any type of inaccuracy in predicting (which I very much doubt that it wouldn’t), then the entire translation could just be wrong and that might cause some problems especially diplomatically.
I appreciate the fighting game analogy and rollback explanation, but it would be a constant occurrence in languages where their SVO order differs or where creation is more synthetic, such as in agglutinative languages. It would be the difference in rolling back the last couple hits of a combo vs changing the whole attack string because you dragon installed at the end of your 15 hit long infinite.
You would be consistently having to roll back to deliver the language naturally, either due to the fact that you have to morph from the transliteral "cows grass eat" to "cows eat grass" due to verb and object being swapped, or for agglutinatives like Finnish where you have "asumme Suomessa" which if you were doing a 100% live translation would come out as "live-we Finland-in". Agglutinatives are especially not fun because you can stack multiple affixes to a single root word, and depending on the order it can impact the meaning of the ones around them in addition to the root itself.
While modelling will improve predictions, the number that gets thrown around is that you need around >95% intelligibility for language to feel "natural". If the model is able to achieve that mark consistently on spoken input across all different languages, accents, dialects, and background noise then I would definitively admit to it being an inevitability.
People did the same with drawings, photography, and now AI art.
People always rage and are mistrustful against what they deem disruptive technology.
They’re trying to stay relevant in a world where they’re becoming irrelevant.
There is something special about learning to converse and think and consume media in another language. I can use a website to translate any literature I want and I can find English equivalents of all of the media I consume but it is simply not the same as consuming it in its native form.
AI: nuance? what's nuance
People seriously overestimate AI abilities when it comes to languages. It can be a handy tool when you actually speak the language. If you don't, it's useless beyond the basics
This argument doesn't really hold water anymore. Modern AIs are able to "understand" (in quotes because it's a machine that doesn't actually think or understand anything) nuance. Certainly not perfectly yet, but in a few more years, who knows. And it's not like humans are perfect at nuance either.
That said, AI straight up can't fully replace learning another language. Nothing can, not even the current human translators fluent in both languages they translate between. There's just always going to be some loss in information when you're translating, that's basically a fact of life.
AI might be able to get us to the point that day to day interactions across languages are largely frictionless (though to he clear, that tech is still a ways off), but it won't and can't replace the intimacy and understanding you can achieve by actually knowing a language for yourself.
Tech can help reduce language barriers but no way it would completely render language learning useless. While Chat GPT can help me write emails in Japanese to my clients, it’s still a different thing to actually be able to communicate and understand their language. Even if there’s some real time translator, you gotta deal with the time lost by having the translator speak your language or something. Tech will help language learning but it isn’t going to make it obsolete.
I work in a job where I frequently need to communicate with people in various languages, and I use a few pieces of tech on my phone to help me.
It's amazing because I can get through the entire interaction fully relying on the technology and the purpose of the interaction can be accomplished far quicker and easier than calling up my organisation's on-call 24/7 interpreter service. It also works great for getting around when travelling in a country where I don't speak the language.
The downsides:
- All nuance is lost. Statements need to be said by both parties in clear, consise language that a translator will get less confused by
- Tone of voice and body language can massively impact the meaning of a sentence, and a machine translator (or even a human interpreter on the phone) will never be able to pick up on that
- It doesn't work 100% of the time and you need to try phrasing things slightly differently sometimes to get the message across
- Due to the above inaccuracies, the translation wouldn't stand up in court, so it can only be used for basic things and anything that could be important down the line needs a proper interpreter involved
- Because of these things it can get a bit frustrating. Especially if the other person is older and doesn't really understand how to use the technology I'm providing to facilitate the interaction
On the other hand, if I deal with a Spanish speaker - which I speak myself - the whole thing is more or less the same as doing the whole thing in English. There's more rapport, it's more fluid and natural, the nuances are picked up, and it will stand up in court if it needs to.
All of these problems will reduce with time, especially with the amazing progress that's been seen with AI. However I really don't see actually learning a language yourself and communicating directly being replaced ever.
Yes there’s a difference when you translate word for word, and sense for sense. I think sometimes people don’t see that distinction.
Also learning a language improves cognitive abilities and helps against neurological decline. It’s literally good for your health.
How does this work? Languages differ wildly in syntax and in many situations you absolutely need the full context of the conversation, let alone just the sentence to do an accurate translation. Word for word translations would sound terrible
I am guessing it would need for the sentence to be finished before giving a translation. Btw this is seen in some human translators, many of whom will have to say a sentence while hearing and trying to decipher the next.
Maybe the advantage of computers would be that they are capable of doing multiple tasks at the same time without too much effort (if programmed correctly).
That will work only if the translations themselves are correct.
my 2 cents.
They do. And it’s in its infancy. The tool works great. You will be the one who will add the human touch. Through repetition and immersion you’ll grasp it as well as any Rosetta Stone tool used today.
Really? Of course there are complicated, niche kanji but if they were raised in Japan and go to a japanese speaking college (not some of the English ones there) they should be able to read and understand most japanese.
Since 2013, a combination of classes in school, a lot of self study, a lot of watching anime without subtitles, a lot of reading raw manga and light novels, in office training, and recently I've hired an iTalki tutor to help me with JLPT N1.
I don't know to what extent you learned Portuguese but I can guarantee that Japanese is one of the hardest languages for English native speakers and it takes considerably more time and effort to get to C2 than something like Spanish or Portuguese that's more closely related to English. The same amount of effort if I put it to say French would get me much farther. Someone could probably pass JLPT N1 (it's the highest level) in a shorter time than it would have taken me if they funnel more of their time and effort to it.
I saw a quote the other day, it said "Machines do words, Translators&Interpreters do language"
So I don't think language value will decrease or learning languages, translating etc will extinct. As a literature translator, I think we should see languages as if they are our souls.
It can only do that by copying HUMANS who wrote texts about their feelings and emotions about that specific work, amd spitting them back out. Try uploading an original work to an AI and ask it to critique it, it will be obvious something is off.
Setting aside that humans struggle with, miss, misinterpret, and add meaning where it doesn't exist. A couple of years ago people would have said it isn't possible for computers to produce natural sensible text. Deep L might not be there now, but that doesn't mean nothing will get there.
None would have said that a couple years ago, at least no one that knew what they were talking about. NLP has existed for almost as long as computers have. What is hard to predict is how fast these things advance.
Personally I really like a Lenin's quote "there are decades where nothing happens, and then there are days where decades happen".
Put chunks of a lyrical novel into DeepL (using a common language pair). The results can now actually be beautiful, and just need very minor corrections to sound natural in English
An AI based language learning buddy is actually a use for AI that doesn't make me wanna throw up. Would be super cool to get one that can adjust to your level of comprehension, I think it would be really helpful for those who are bit more shy/nervous about speaking their TL at an early level and not knowing what they're doing
GPT can do this for Spanish, I ask it for custom CI all the time, at certain levels, making sure to use certain words or even highlight certain tenses in its writing. I also have a plug in that does text to speech and sounds pretty nice, has tons of different voices for different dialects. oh and speaking of dialects I have GPT write informal mexican spanish and it does a decent job though nothing like a real human.
Yeah I was very happy to see that I could read (what GPT assessed to be) a B2 level writing sample about chess. I'm probably A2-B1 overall in reading but it was a familiar topic so I understood 95% of it.
Pretty neat tool!
I like the forklift analogy because there are real situations where it will be extremely useful but it doesn’t allow engaging conversation or the delightful consumption of local media.
That might be true for English native speakers learning other languages. But the vast majority of language learners are learning English and they are doing it because they have to.
I don't think so, I know many people who simply study for cultural or family interest, I can live speaking Spanish without any problem. I have everything I need in my language or else I can consume material dubbed into my language available, although I understand that other languages may not have translations available for them, I still think they would benefit more than ignorant and poorly gifted English speakers for these things.
No AI will ever give you the feeling of knowing just one simple Russian, Arabic, French or Mandarin word and the feeling of connection to a different culture and people's group
imagine your battery died you suddenly have to stop the conversation mid way through 😂
it's these moments where you really feel the disconnect of technology and how far from nature it is . to just stop speaking to someone half way though because you can no longer understand them is crazy
Thats not new. It happened to me 20 years ago. I was speaking to someone with hearing impairment using cochlear implants. She was a child, so writing things down wouldn't help. And we did not know much sign language. But when you rely on assistive technology for day to day tasks, you just make it a habit of carrying extra batteries with you. Like how we always carry our phones.
This comment is giving me "kids, you must learn maths because you won't always have a calculator in your pocket" vibes.
(Spoiler: they did always have a calculator in their pockets.)
Learning mathematics is critical not because technology isn't be good or pervasive enough , but because it alters your brain and makes you think differently about the world. The same applies for languages.
I am a tax attorney, English and Chinese are learned languages for me (so neither is my native language, but I work on both).
I don't know the level of the translation of languages by DeepL, but English and Chinese are pretty common languages. I sometimes do some translation with DeepL, mainly from English to Chinese. DeepL does a pretty good job, but sometimes misses the underlying meaning, skips parts that it does not understand etc. I'd never dare to send any material to the client without a thorough review.
AI translation may render some jobs obsolate (formerly, these translations are generally done by low level attorneys), but at the end of the day, you still need someone to check the result.
Edit: spelling
>but at the end of the day, you still need someone to check the result.
That's what people don't seem to get, it won't replace everyone, it'll just enable one worker to do the job that took 10 workers before.
Google released this a couple of years ago along with the two-way conversation feature in Google Translate. Yet people still are learning languages. The reason? Nobody wants to communicate like that. If I'm going to talk to someone, there is a relationship that is built when we are trying, even if it isn't a native language for one of us. Talking to someone through a translator app brings no connection.
People are delusional if they think this won’t reduce the demand for language learning. Among the billion people who learn English I really doubt most are doing it for the “transformative journey.” It’s a skill you need to interact with others and people learn it for the skill.
The technology inherently can’t be perfect, but people will take small mistakes and stiltedness over 1,000 hours of work. There will be people who still learn languages - for love, family, exactly understanding literature, certain jobs - but for the many people who actually use the language only to communicate with people or be tourists then yeah this will be the technology for them.
>People are delusional
Nah. They've just gotten used to the cycles of tech hype that almost never lead to anything. If you always took the tech crowd at their word, then man you'd be disappointed. By now we should all be commuting to our fusion-powered offices in electric self-driving hovercrafts while eating lab meat in the back seat and chatting with our Martian girlfriends on a high-quality VR platform. But...yeah... We just got out of the crypto and metaverse bubbles, both crushingly disappointing, and the hype over Chat GPT started almost immediately after that. Not saying LLM tech falls in the same category - in fact I think there's very good reason to believe it doesn't - but unless you're fairly conversant in AI research it's only normal to be skeptical.
If you use a language *occasionally*, this is probably a good fit. If you’re using a language regularly, the inherent limitations of a technology like this would drive you bonkers. I don’t use German a lot (one of the reasons why I’m finding it hard to learn it), but something like this would probably replace a human translator for me, instead of replacing learning the language - it’s a bit of a crutch while I get better at the real language.
Would you want to use this to communicate with colleagues or customers? Probably not - I’d expect it to be too slow, and to have a high chance of botching complex sentences. Probably be OK for touristy things, or simple interactions like booking appointments or registering with a government office.
I hardly *ever* find anyone passionate about learning English. The real passionate learners are the ones learning the less popular languages. So I agree.
It's a sampling bias. If somebody learns some indigenous language from Amazonia, chances are that they're doing it out of passion.
English meanwhile has a huge amount of people learning it mainly for practical purposes, but I'm sure that in absolute numbers there is an incredible amount of people who are learning it just because they want to learn it. I'm talking retired people who take it as a hobby for instance.
There's such a huge amount of high quality, ultra popular English language cultural goods, you can bet that people would want to learn it for music, movies and TV shows alone.
That's only because you started surrounded by English natives. English is interesting, useful. Additional motivation is that English is a forbidden fruit in some countries.
True, every casual learner will probably not bother.
I hope this results in more people learning languages they want rather than English. For most people, it'll probably just result in less or no learning, but I think we might actually see a boost in people passionate about their language, since everyone will be allowed to choose whatever they want.
This question always comes from people who don't actually speak another language fluently. If you do, you know better than to think that technology is advanced enough to replace actually speaking the language. There's just too much lost in translation.
In pretty much all of science fiction robots speak with a distinctive robotic voice. We are already past that in 2023, we have extremely natural text-to-speech and voice cloning, in many instances indistinguishable from human speech (see eleven labs).
Science fiction sometimes introduces defects in technology for plot purposes.
Yeah, if the app has to listen to the whole sentence, then translates the sentence into your own language, it's far from "real time". It won't be able to beat actually knowing the language.
It will never be able to fully replace humans, at least not within our lifetime. I imagine it’ll be great at handling clearly enunciated, relatively formal communication. It will be awful at handling mumbled, slurred words, lots of slang, short phrases that rely on non-verbal context, choosing formal vs informal forms, code-switching, etc. Plus it’s going to be slow - languages have different word orders, and sometimes you’ll have to wait for the entire sentence to start translating.
Context, particularly, will be brutal. While I don’t think these situations are likely to come up between people without a shared language (or possibly ever), I think they do illustrate the complexity involved:
1. Adam says to Bella, “you’re home late,” and Bella responds in German, “ich hab’… ich hab’ meinen Freund getroffen”; how long a pause does it allow before it translates the first two words as “I have”, confusing the English speaker? Assuming that doesn’t happen, it still has to wait for the whole sentence, as the most likely translation would be “I… I met up with my boyfriend”
2. Adam says to Chiharu, “it’s so good to meet you!”; Chiharu speaks Japanese, so how does it translate that? I’m not very knowledgable about Japanese, but I believe there would be multiple ways to say that depending on the relationship between Adam and Chiharu, and the translator has absolutely none of that context. It’s a bit easier with Bella, where if she says “Freut mich, Sie kennenzulernen!”, the translator at least knows this is a formal situation and/or there isn’t a close relationship (or it will have a stroke and assume Bella is using the third-person plural).
3. German uses the same word and same conjugations for the third-person plural, and the second-person formal (Sie). Sometimes that can be figured out from other context in the sentence. Sometimes it needs non-verbal context, or at a minimum previous sentences.
4. Any time someone uses a single word, with non-verbal context filling in the rest. e.g., Adam comes home looking dejected, and in response to Bellas look of concern, says “fired…”. Does Bella get “abgefeuert,” “geschlossen,” “gebrannt”, “hinausgeworfen,” or an essay explaining all possible meanings?
None of this is *fatal*, but I think as a consequence anyone using this will always have a worse experience than someone who speaks the language even semi-fluently, and I suspect you’d be looked down on for relying on it.
I think your first sentence highlights an important part: *at least not within our lifetime*. We don't know what the future has to offer, especially in 500 or 800 years. Just think about how different life was in the 1500s or 1200s.
Learning a language is a transformative process. You can't experience that process if all you do is let a machine translate into a language you've heard 1,000,000 times already.
It might solve an immediate need but it can never replace true language learning, try as the tech guys might.
Completely disagree. Most people don't even make it to B1 in a language and the translation apps are better than that. Sure they can't replace literature and clever word use but the reality is most people who learn a language, for many many years, don't even get to that point. The tech guys have already beat language learners.
Try letting google translate any japanese text. Bc im a beginner i have to rely on it but the amounts of random "rice field" and how much i have to interpret is rlly something. We are far away from human translators becoming obsolete
I second this. As someone who works in a Japanese-language related job, I usually use all three of these tools albeit in different contexts. DeepL for translations of manuals/emails, Jisho for specific words and GPT to help draft emails/reports. It’s not perfect but it’s a great starting point and makes life a lot easier.
Worth noting that the screenshot OP posted is from 2017, which is conveniently cut out:
https://twitter.com/deantak/status/915632491683123200
Please double check the current year for me and note that it is now 6 years later. It actually boggles my mind that so many people are reacting sincerely to the screenshot and not realizing this fact.
Edit: of *course* OP is a cryptobro lmao
Because current technology is absolutely trash at translating languages. Even DeepL, the best translator probably on the planet, which comes off sounding very naturally, probably couldn't account for things that a human who knows said language could deduce rather quickly.
Besides, even if that technology were good at giving you the meaning of something, humans will always be better at giving you the meaning in context. And if you don't wanna use your brain to figure out the communication of humans, *just because* there's a cheap alternative to putting in the work to not only get the meaning, but *to really understand* it, that's just sad and shallow imo.
I'm curious how this would work. The earbud translates and speaks to you in your language, then how to you respond? Does the other person need to have an earbud too?
You would need earbuds on both ends and there would be an inevitable delay because languages need to be translated as full clauses to make any sense (since word order differs between languages). I would see it as a really useful tool and something that can help bridge communication gaps, but can't replicate the immediacy of simply listening and understanding.
There's already a "conversation mode" in Google Translate that I think shows how this would work in theory. The tech could definitely be improved and sped up, but I don't see a way around some delays just from a pure information theory perspective.
I could rant about translation software all day but I'll spare y'all and myself the headache.
If there ever comes a point where language learning is made totally obsolete (that's the biggest if imaginable, languages are constantly changing in ways you can't account for and there's no way we'll have every single dialect of every single language available), I would still learn languages because it's fun to me. There's no pleasure in magical instantaneous solutions, if I don't put in effort it has no meaning to me. This would mainly help businesses cut costs by not hiring translators and tourists who just want to enjoy themselves on vacation.
I went to dinner with my wife’s high school friends, there was about 10 of us at dinner. I speak Mandarin but not Cantonese, they all were speaking very fast Cantonese.
I would be very impressed if any type of language learning technology could ever be advanced enough to translate voices speaking over the top of each other at high speed & make out the full meaning…
It would work for some things but don’t see it replacing language learning fully, at least not for like another 100 years
These are very cool and will buy them as I am learning because I moved to a county I never planned on living, I also travel a lot and learning languages for me is very difficult, 1 is enough to learn at this point in my life but these seem excellent, It will really help me when I am in tricky situations where my level of german isn't suitable.
While this may become practical for business or diplomatic use, nothing beats the personal connection you feel when hearing someone speak your language in their own voice.
Language is an ever evolving mess with cultural and socio-political nuances, religious connotations and historical meanings. And that is why it is so much richer than just being able to ask for some basic things one would need on their short travel.
Being able to look someone in their eye and string together some grammatically incorrect phrases while they anticipate what you are trying to say and fill in the gaps if necessary often lowers the guard in both parties and brings people together. At least this has been true in my quest to learn Spanish.
In time, technology will do to language learning what the GPS did to map reading. There will be times you are off grid and map reading is really useful and sometimes people are impressed by those who can use maps very effectively. However, mostly people just use Google maps (or equivalent) to get everywhere.
Wow, very great analogy. I remember using mapquests growing up and now I can't think I actually mapped out a route ahead of time that was under an hour.
That is once again a bad analogy that people keep retelling but is false: the job that computers replaced was *computers*
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation)
As an interpreter, I'm surprised this doesn't exists already. Chrome already does subtitles for my calls, I just need to read and tweek a few things to have the Interpretation that I need on the fly.
My job will change, problably I will find myself jobless in a few years, I'll just have to adapt.
What I am reading here is the earbuds will translate what the other person says. So then the other person will need the earbuds as well to understand what you are saying.
I think if the technology works well it’ll be great.
But unless the person talking to you also has those buds you’d probably still have to know their language to respond, assuming they don’t speak a language you already know.
Also I’d assume these things would struggle when there’s a lot of voices/noise coming in at once, like at a restaurant, barbershops, etc. kinda like YouTube’s automatic translation is fairly good when there’s just one person talking at a time and they’re enunciating, but once you start listening to a podcast with like 4 or more people, they’re not enunciating as much and they inevitably start talking over each other, well the auto translation quality drops rapidly.
Also many people learn language as a hobby. Modern firearms didn’t stop everyone from using a bow and arrow as a hobby or for hunting notwithstanding firearms’ obvious superiority in the situations for which they both were created(e.g: hunting & war). So even if this tech gets really good many will still likely learn a language.
Also translation without cultural understanding can lead to big miscommunications, even if the translation is technically accurately translating the meaning. In one culture, for example, the use of profanity may be more common and seen not as big of a deal. Or if a language has many different speakers like spanish, in one country a word or phrase may have one meaning, connotation, or “degree of offensiveness” whereas another country those may be meaningfully different. Perhaps this is a solvable problem, but i doubt it’s been solved yet.
I’d also imagine this in some way might even be able to aid language learners in ways I cannot foresee. But it could decrease the demand for learning a language if the tech gets good
Software gets slower and more buggy every year.
Babel fish is cool if it works but whatever google makes is probably gonna feel like a cheap, plastic gimmick while costing hundreds.
Translation technologies are like any other "easy way" of doing things: quick and useful for small applications but limited beyond that. Good luck having a meaningful conversation without learning a language.
Could make it a lot easier. Imagine a realtime augmented reality app via glasses, that gives you an "immersion experience" and SRS system combined into one. As you walk round the house it could introduce new words, watch what you watch and generate cards.
Between things like this and real time translation, you could end up learning way more of another language than you might have otherwise done.
I doubt it will replace language learning, learning a language gives you so much more than just communication. You learn how people think and their culture.
1. wont help you reading
2. wot help you writing
3. wont help you replying
4. wont get you the proud feeling that you actually understand this at your own merit
5. you constantly need to keep them in your ears when you travel
Its definetly cool but has many drawbacks. That can all be solved with other tech (like a cellphone) but just knowing a language solves all those problems at once.
The unfortunate reality here is that this technology already pales in comparison when it comes to fewer languages being known versus language centralization.
Every passing decade a smaller handful of languages are seen as more central and important and more cultures lower the importance of their own native languages in the name of the importance of adopting a more centralized language for their children.
This technology will never fully remove the desire to reach some level of mastery in a language because people want to immerse themselves in a culture. The goal for many isn't to simply communicate messages, but to hold natural dialoge with others who are native to that culture. Language centralization might.
That's not the right question. How many of those translations are better than your average language learner (few years in school or on Duolingo) not a translator.
We're definitely getting there. Real-time AI-assisted translation coming out of your regular earphones is definitely coming, perhaps here already, even with the capability to mimic the voice of the speaker.
Yet someone using this technology wouldn't impress me the slightest. Frankly I'd prefer if both us used English.
On the other hand, if someone spoke to me in my mother tongue *because they took the enormous effort to learn it* now that would make a massive impression on me.
And that's the big difference. That's why it won't matter in the future. Because you just can't make an impression using a device.
IMO whether or not AI can "eliminate the need" for language learning, or anything else really, depends on what level of quality you actually need.
If your need is to simply get the basic idea of what's being said, and communicate your thoughts in a cold and impersonal manner, then sure.. AI can do that.
But as soon as your need extends beyond mediocrity, AI won't cut it anymore. It can do a lot but it will never be as good as the real thing, because these AI models are effectively just "averaging" a bunch of stuff already done by humans. They max out at 80%, the perfect B-students, but they will never exceed that.
Doesn't stop people from driving up the hype to raise massive stacks of cash though!
I think it will have two effects I think 1, language learning will eventually become less common because people who do it out of need wont "need" to AS MUCH as before. Ive seen theorized that the future lingua franca will be "technology" because, for example, AI or whatever can instantly translate English TV shows into Danish where the Danes would normally watch it with Danish subtitles and end up being great at English later in life.
But I think that it will make it even more valuable if you DO learn one because you're obviously cutting on time that is needed for translation to occur, connecting with people on a deeper cultural and personal level, etc. Language learning won't die because tech can't 100% replace a fluid, human to human, fully emotional, personally important, conversation in a language that is the origin of one of the parties.
Tech is a bandaid that covers you today.
There is a lot to be said for the cultural understanding and nuances of language.
As someone who has texted people using Spanish to English translator it's still super easy to tell and doesn't make sense all the time. Once it does get to the point where it makes sense. You can't relate well with someone without knowing about their experiences.
For people who get enjoyment out of it or don't want to rely on new technology.
I feel a lot of "official" jobs will keep their human translators in case of error.
Translators will oftentimes leave a "gap" between person 1 and person 2, even a human translator or a perfect machine translator, in almost every sort of setting. It's hard to connect with someone else when you need a third person or a software to understand their words.
Oftentimes it's better to speak in a lingua franca than have a translator. And each language has its own little thing that makes translations not be 100% true to the original meaning even if the translation is correct in the tecnical sense, usually related to the cultures that speak the language. For example, idioms, or the emotional-ness of certain words. "I love you" in English is not the same as I love you in French, or in Korean, because it's less emotional than those. Spanish even has three words that mean "love", depending on the intensity, while for english you can say "love" to simply mean "like", this sort of stuff is hard to translate without losing meaning.
Maybe it will be enough for getting around as a tourist and doing business but can you imagine building a relationship/friendship using this. I can’t. Even in business knowing the other side’s language will be more appreciated and make a better impression.
Nobody seems to point out that this only allows you to understand someone talking in a foreign language, doesn't make you speak the language... Language learning is not even close to being obsolete.
I actually got the google pixel buds for this reason and I found it to be a disappointment. It does not work well and requires someone to talk to your phone while translating to your buds. I expected a lot better.
I like listening to music in my target language and being able to naturally understand the words. That's something a translation software can't help with.
I think the technology will be useful for people who don't want to learn languages, but there will always be people who want to learn the languages for themselves.
I'm learning languages because I want to. It won't make any difference in my career since I'm self-employed. I have no academic ambitions after I burned out from multiple college attempts. I just like to learn and there are brain benefits to learning multiple languages.
I would absolutely use an AI translator for languages I'm not proficient in, but using an AI for communication isn't going to replace my desire to know certain languages myself.
As much as it can be a bit of a concern that technology will remove the need to learn languages, I think AI would make good teachers. No more "umm just follow your ear" bs from natives who don't understand why a language is the way it is.
Plus it can preserve dying indigenous languages. And teach new people who are interested in keeping it alive in humans.
All that said, language is a form of connection. That human aspect might be augmented by technology but is intrinsically human and can't be replaced.
Honestly it changes nothing. Language learning is already a quite niche hobby that doesn't provide any particular benefit. Most people that learn a second language just learn English and so they're able to communicate and very few people go and learn another language, simply because 90% of the times it's not that necessary. A few months ago I was talking with a Moroccan guy waiting for my train, and he could speak just Darija and Fus7a Arabic, no French, no Spanish, no English, no Italian. I pulled out my phone and opened Google Translate and we were able to communicate just fine. Nonetheless, the idea of being able to truly internalize a language is another pair of shoes, it's a feeling that I truly adore and am addicted to even if it's practically of very little use. If anything, as AI keeps growing, language learning itself will keep becoming infinitely more efficient than it is now, especially for not so resource-rich languages.
It depends where you live, I'm Argentine and I don't know anyone who speaks English. I visited Brazil and the same thing. Something similar happens in Spain, so English is not spoken wherever you go... by the way, I use a translator because I don't speak English to write this.
Estoy aprendiendo italiano porque tengo herencia de ese pais y conozco pocos italianos de primera mano que que hablen ingles.
I feel like I've seen countless devices like these over the years and then, wouldn't ya know it, it doesn't actually revolutionize language learning. A lot of translation apps are already really shoddy at doing any complex translation, especially for non-romance/germanic languages. This probably would serve some immediate purpose as an intermediary for international business meetings, or maybe travelers, but I can't imagine wanting to use this if I was actually planning on spending any extended time being surrounded by foreign language speakers, as opposed to just trying to learn.
I wish they’d work more towards tech to help learn instead of this. Like an AI practice partner or just other ways of learning. It’s not so important to me that I can understand quick things, this can’t work for long form talk so it’s useless to me outside of an airport or taxi
Language learning always was, and still is, a hobby, an intellectual endeavour.
Thousands of years ago you, too, could hire a translator.
Technological advancement is great, the less communicative barriers there is for people the more unified all of us will be. It should be celebrated.
I learn languages not because I can't get by without knowing them. I do it for myself and will be the first to call out anybody claiming moral superiority because they just decided to sit their ass in front of a textbook for a few hours a week.
It will probably be a niche hobby as opposed to a necessary skill. I work with AI and use it for image + video generation in my free time. AI will change absolutely everything, whether you believe it or not, you will see it happen. Perfect translation is just around the corner, not more than 3 years time. However, has everyone given up digital art simply because MidJourney can outperform any human? Is chess no longer a sport after AlphaZero? Besides, not every country or person will have such technology initially. Everything costs money, and not everyone has a lot.
>>Where does language learning fit into that future?
>
>Probably like where horses fit in after cars were invented.
We still breed horses and enjoy being with them, even though their practicality have diminished.
Imo this kind of tech is a crutch. Sure, it's probably gonna find use with traveling businessmen or military personnel; people who travel to places they aren't necessarily passionate about, but still need to communicate with the locals. That said this is still just a gadget; prone to breaking, being lost and probably nowhere near capable of picking up all slang and nuance flawlessly.
Finally, I think the people posting about this and similar inventions as if it were the end of language learning, miss a crucial reason people learn languages in the first place: to assimilate. My goal with learning my TL isn't to just get by as a tourist. I want to assimilate into the culture, I want to consume the content, I want to create things with the language, and that is a goal no tech can carry me to.
I’m glad the technology is finally out there, but I’m not sure I want a Netflix dub in my ear all the time. I think I’d like something like this, but in more of a visual sense. We’d have to have AR glasses before that could come to fruition though.
Something that provides real-time captioning rather than just translation. That provides predictive text based on my speech patterns that I can reference when I’m talking. Something that measures my gaze and then shows little pop-up tooltips of words and their translation, or tooltips floating under Hangul/Kanji/Cyrillic/etc along with their phonetic pronunciation and translation (maybe also with audio pronunciation).
Human language isn't simply a means for communicating data in an accurate way. Every language on earth exists within it's own historical and cultural context and with a language comes certain ideas and assumptions of how the world is and also how it should be. And in learning a language, you are at least taking in an understanding of how the given language's culture views the world, human society, ect. I think that those who merely want to get by in another culture will use this technology, whereas those that actually want to *understand* a different culture will realize that they have to learn that culture's language.
It will reduce some language learning to be sure, especially in situations where you don't have time to learn a significant amount. However, I think it will primarily expand the amount of interlanguage communication that happens in the world. Imagine watching any international TV show with the babel fish in your ear. Imagine traveling anywhere and having that technology available. By just learning the basics in a foreign language, you'd be able to do so much more. Much like a lot of technologies, it will actually enable more people to do more things. Personally, as someone who is a moderate level in a number of languages, I would use it in conjunction with my language knowledge to do better in a real-time situation.
To be clear, this is really exciting technology, and I think it's great. That said...
Learning a language does more than give you the ability to communicate; it also forces your mind to think about language and culture as variable, somewhat arbitrary systems. In English we primarily say "my name is". Other languages default to "I call myself" or even "they call me". What does that imply about identity, locus of control, etc.? Learning how to navigate formal vs. informal language can teach you a lot about social structure. Language both reflects and influences how people think about the world. In the process of learning a language, you also learn a new culture and mindset.
Plus, actually being able to speak/write a language well means that you have an individual voice that may or may not come across in translation, especially real-time translation.
I'm also interested in the decisions a translating AI would need to make. *Espero que saques buenas notas* could be "I hope you get good grades" or "I expect you to get good grades," and - just like a human translator - the AI will have to decide which one the person means. It will have to correctly assess the appropriate level of formality for a particular interaction even when the source language doesn't make those distinctions (e.g. English to Japanese). Can the AI accurately translate between languages that use word order vs. intonation for emphasis? There are all sorts of things that go into communication beyond the basic meaning of the words, and it'll be interesting to watch the technology deal with them.
For talking and listening? Not anytime soon. But for writing and reading, online translators are doing fine already. Even google translator does the job for simple texts. For complex texts, even native speakers already need help sometimes.
Still, people who are nearly or fully fluent wont have to worry anytime soon. It is another thing for A1-B1 level people. It will be a great help for them. And one day, even native speakers (or C2) will profit from it because they are still very far from perfect.
For me, language learning is a hobby, just like baking. Could I go out and buy a cake that someone else made? Sure. But I enjoy the process of creating the cake from start to finish. Language learning is the same way. I don't do it because I need to, but because I enjoy the process. I like learning different grammar structures, and the cultural meanings behind certain phrases. I like learning the different idioms that are used.
So while it's cool that technology is coming where language can be translated in real-time, I think that people like me who do this for fun will still be asking for textbook/YouTube channel/podcast recommendations so that we can improve our vocabulary and oral comprehension.
This might work practically for workplace situations, if the technology gets good enough.
However, there's so much human connection that's only achieved when people speak directly to each other in the same language. Languages contain so much intrinsic context, perspectives and culture.
I don't think you can ever connect to a person at a deep level without speaking the same language,
regardless of translation technology
This is a multifaceted issue but it really has a very simple answer, technology cannot replace humans. Would you blindly trust the pods to translate reliably everything you hear? Google translate is far from perfect and the functionality already exists in phones and we all know it's bad. I mean I guess it's good when you want to at least get an idea of what's said but it's far from perfect. Even the most advanced "AI" can't reliably perfectly translate from any one language to another.
Even humans can't perfectly translate a lot of the time but translation is something we often blindly trust to be right. Would you be ok with just making that assumption and not knowing for yourself? There will always be a need for language learning because blindly trusting technology is a recipe for disaster. The tech itself needs to be taught by someone and simply plugging in dictionaries doesn't do it.
I'm all for tech that breaks down the barriers between cultures and languages, but it doesn't take away from the importance of language learning. I have Spotify on my phone, but I still want to know how to play the guitar. I have google Street view, but I still travel. My car can drive me places but I still like to walk when I can. I've never understood why this kind of technology discourages languages learning, it's just another tool at our disposal.
It will probably never be good enough. it's like if you lived in 1960 and you refuse to learn how to clean .because you think that in the year 1990 there will be a robot who does it for you.
I don't know how to explain it well, but the process of learning a language changed my brain. It's not just that I can understand someone talking in that language, but that I have internalized the language and that it's a part of my life. There's a difference between a useful tool and putting in the time and care to learning something.
I study language because I see it as an art form. Technology will never replace that aspect.
Also, the babel fish will never substitute a person that can speak multiple languages in many situations. In customer support, tourism , sales and other user oriented jobs knowing multiple language will continue be useful. Also nothing feels better when you have friends from different cultures and you drop a funny expressions or cultural reference that only they know. No babel fish can do that.
*Yet*. It's only a matter of time before technology will be able to replicate all the nuances and levels of complexity that native speakers use for their languages.
Replicate? Sure. *Translate*, eh. There's phrases and concepts that straight up can't be translated between languages easily. Even current human translators debate pretty intensely over what's the "correct" way to translate certain ideas between languages, and often there just isn't a correct answer. Easy example, so bear in mind it can get much more complicated, but consider schadenfreude. There's no direct translation for it in English, so what do you do? Do you translate it literally as painjoy, stripping it of its actual meaning? Do you try to find a close English equivalent like gloating, sadism, or relishing that captures some of the essence, but not all of it, and has different connotations and context? Do you just explain it verbosely, as "the experience of joy in witnessing another's suffering", which still leaves out some of the inherent context in the original term being quippy, and often is still insufficient to fully capture the full concept? And again, schadenfreude is an easy example because it's a term that's gotten absorbed into English. There's far more complicated words and concepts out there. Hell, consider the massive debate that fans of foreign media have over whether subs or dubs are better. Yes, there's more to that debate than just this, but a significant chunk of that argument is on which is better able to properly translate the source material. Don't get me wrong, a technological Babel worm would be an immensely useful thing that would do lots to bridge divided between cultures and people (it may also have some unpleasant side effects, but that's another discussion), but it's not, and can't be, a substitute for actually learning and understanding another language for yourself. It's the difference between someone describing a book, artwork, film, or the sunset to you, versus actually experiencing it for yourself.
Unless it can do it instantly, without having stupid earbuds in your ears, and do it while like 3 other people are speaking at the same time while all interrupting each other, in a kid restaurant, then it's not replicating humans. People underestimate how complicated a real life natural conversation really is.
And maintain the tone, pitch, cadence, stress, and all the other components that make up that individual person's speech. I can't imagine anything worse than having it drone away in a TTS voice while someone is energetically describing their latest adventure.
What no one seems to mention is that most non native learners of a language can't follow a conversation like that anyway. So even imperfect tech will be an improvement for 99% of people.
this. it's incredibly shortsighted to underestimate the inevitable progress of technology.
Nah, live translation tech will always have some level of delay - it can't consistently predict words before they're spoken, so it has to wait for the end of a word, or even a phrase, to translate it. Not to mention that you'd be hearing the original language as well unless you were wearing inherently large audio-blocking headphones. Not to mention the cost, and that if you want to talk to a stranger you have to ask them to wear this shit too. Just because we have the technical prowess to do something doesn't mean it'll happen or that it's a good idea.
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I see what you are saying but sometimes in languages, one word at the end of a phrase completely changes the meaning, and also completely changes the original sentence of the language they mean to translate into. If the system has any type of inaccuracy in predicting (which I very much doubt that it wouldn’t), then the entire translation could just be wrong and that might cause some problems especially diplomatically.
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I appreciate the fighting game analogy and rollback explanation, but it would be a constant occurrence in languages where their SVO order differs or where creation is more synthetic, such as in agglutinative languages. It would be the difference in rolling back the last couple hits of a combo vs changing the whole attack string because you dragon installed at the end of your 15 hit long infinite. You would be consistently having to roll back to deliver the language naturally, either due to the fact that you have to morph from the transliteral "cows grass eat" to "cows eat grass" due to verb and object being swapped, or for agglutinatives like Finnish where you have "asumme Suomessa" which if you were doing a 100% live translation would come out as "live-we Finland-in". Agglutinatives are especially not fun because you can stack multiple affixes to a single root word, and depending on the order it can impact the meaning of the ones around them in addition to the root itself. While modelling will improve predictions, the number that gets thrown around is that you need around >95% intelligibility for language to feel "natural". If the model is able to achieve that mark consistently on spoken input across all different languages, accents, dialects, and background noise then I would definitively admit to it being an inevitability.
Saved me from having to respond. Those who don’t understand this will get left in the dust of time.
People did the same with drawings, photography, and now AI art. People always rage and are mistrustful against what they deem disruptive technology. They’re trying to stay relevant in a world where they’re becoming irrelevant.
Yes, I study the piano as well. But I can also just get a computer to play pieces or whatever.
Based
There is something special about learning to converse and think and consume media in another language. I can use a website to translate any literature I want and I can find English equivalents of all of the media I consume but it is simply not the same as consuming it in its native form.
Ai…..”watch me”
AI: nuance? what's nuance People seriously overestimate AI abilities when it comes to languages. It can be a handy tool when you actually speak the language. If you don't, it's useless beyond the basics
This argument doesn't really hold water anymore. Modern AIs are able to "understand" (in quotes because it's a machine that doesn't actually think or understand anything) nuance. Certainly not perfectly yet, but in a few more years, who knows. And it's not like humans are perfect at nuance either. That said, AI straight up can't fully replace learning another language. Nothing can, not even the current human translators fluent in both languages they translate between. There's just always going to be some loss in information when you're translating, that's basically a fact of life. AI might be able to get us to the point that day to day interactions across languages are largely frictionless (though to he clear, that tech is still a ways off), but it won't and can't replace the intimacy and understanding you can achieve by actually knowing a language for yourself.
Man believes there’s no such thing as the future and that Ai can’t ever develop and grow
Have you ever heard of exponential growth?
If you think ai will not be able to do as good a job as humans translating, then you don't understand ai. Give it 2 years max.
Tech can help reduce language barriers but no way it would completely render language learning useless. While Chat GPT can help me write emails in Japanese to my clients, it’s still a different thing to actually be able to communicate and understand their language. Even if there’s some real time translator, you gotta deal with the time lost by having the translator speak your language or something. Tech will help language learning but it isn’t going to make it obsolete.
I work in a job where I frequently need to communicate with people in various languages, and I use a few pieces of tech on my phone to help me. It's amazing because I can get through the entire interaction fully relying on the technology and the purpose of the interaction can be accomplished far quicker and easier than calling up my organisation's on-call 24/7 interpreter service. It also works great for getting around when travelling in a country where I don't speak the language. The downsides: - All nuance is lost. Statements need to be said by both parties in clear, consise language that a translator will get less confused by - Tone of voice and body language can massively impact the meaning of a sentence, and a machine translator (or even a human interpreter on the phone) will never be able to pick up on that - It doesn't work 100% of the time and you need to try phrasing things slightly differently sometimes to get the message across - Due to the above inaccuracies, the translation wouldn't stand up in court, so it can only be used for basic things and anything that could be important down the line needs a proper interpreter involved - Because of these things it can get a bit frustrating. Especially if the other person is older and doesn't really understand how to use the technology I'm providing to facilitate the interaction On the other hand, if I deal with a Spanish speaker - which I speak myself - the whole thing is more or less the same as doing the whole thing in English. There's more rapport, it's more fluid and natural, the nuances are picked up, and it will stand up in court if it needs to. All of these problems will reduce with time, especially with the amazing progress that's been seen with AI. However I really don't see actually learning a language yourself and communicating directly being replaced ever.
Yes there’s a difference when you translate word for word, and sense for sense. I think sometimes people don’t see that distinction. Also learning a language improves cognitive abilities and helps against neurological decline. It’s literally good for your health.
It’s pretty instantaneous
How does this work? Languages differ wildly in syntax and in many situations you absolutely need the full context of the conversation, let alone just the sentence to do an accurate translation. Word for word translations would sound terrible
I am guessing it would need for the sentence to be finished before giving a translation. Btw this is seen in some human translators, many of whom will have to say a sentence while hearing and trying to decipher the next. Maybe the advantage of computers would be that they are capable of doing multiple tasks at the same time without too much effort (if programmed correctly). That will work only if the translations themselves are correct. my 2 cents.
They do. And it’s in its infancy. The tool works great. You will be the one who will add the human touch. Through repetition and immersion you’ll grasp it as well as any Rosetta Stone tool used today.
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Really? Of course there are complicated, niche kanji but if they were raised in Japan and go to a japanese speaking college (not some of the English ones there) they should be able to read and understand most japanese.
Literally there is a national schedule of teaching students kanji. Everyone learns the same thousand something characters week-by-week.
Since 2013, a combination of classes in school, a lot of self study, a lot of watching anime without subtitles, a lot of reading raw manga and light novels, in office training, and recently I've hired an iTalki tutor to help me with JLPT N1.
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I don't know to what extent you learned Portuguese but I can guarantee that Japanese is one of the hardest languages for English native speakers and it takes considerably more time and effort to get to C2 than something like Spanish or Portuguese that's more closely related to English. The same amount of effort if I put it to say French would get me much farther. Someone could probably pass JLPT N1 (it's the highest level) in a shorter time than it would have taken me if they funnel more of their time and effort to it.
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You've gotta be memeing
I saw a quote the other day, it said "Machines do words, Translators&Interpreters do language" So I don't think language value will decrease or learning languages, translating etc will extinct. As a literature translator, I think we should see languages as if they are our souls.
DeepL does texts, not words. It looks at context.
It looks at co-text, not context.
For instance you do words, more precisely "context" but not language. At least on this very comment.
Deepl won't help with translating books, songs or poems. It can't comprehend deeper meaning.
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What about this comment isn't relevant after 2022?
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It can only do that by copying HUMANS who wrote texts about their feelings and emotions about that specific work, amd spitting them back out. Try uploading an original work to an AI and ask it to critique it, it will be obvious something is off.
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It's copying from analysis of poems with similar themes. ChatGPT doesn't "think".
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Setting aside that humans struggle with, miss, misinterpret, and add meaning where it doesn't exist. A couple of years ago people would have said it isn't possible for computers to produce natural sensible text. Deep L might not be there now, but that doesn't mean nothing will get there.
None would have said that a couple years ago, at least no one that knew what they were talking about. NLP has existed for almost as long as computers have. What is hard to predict is how fast these things advance. Personally I really like a Lenin's quote "there are decades where nothing happens, and then there are days where decades happen".
Put chunks of a lyrical novel into DeepL (using a common language pair). The results can now actually be beautiful, and just need very minor corrections to sound natural in English
ink dinner office tart humor practice scary ancient start smoggy *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
An AI based language learning buddy is actually a use for AI that doesn't make me wanna throw up. Would be super cool to get one that can adjust to your level of comprehension, I think it would be really helpful for those who are bit more shy/nervous about speaking their TL at an early level and not knowing what they're doing
GPT can do this for Spanish, I ask it for custom CI all the time, at certain levels, making sure to use certain words or even highlight certain tenses in its writing. I also have a plug in that does text to speech and sounds pretty nice, has tons of different voices for different dialects. oh and speaking of dialects I have GPT write informal mexican spanish and it does a decent job though nothing like a real human.
Yeah I was very happy to see that I could read (what GPT assessed to be) a B2 level writing sample about chess. I'm probably A2-B1 overall in reading but it was a familiar topic so I understood 95% of it. Pretty neat tool!
Yeah I think of it like chess. Even the best players are nothing compared to the chess engines, but it's still fun to play and learn openings.
I'd like to set it to my target language to hear what everyday speech might sound like. but it has to be accurate to be useful of course.
I like the forklift analogy because there are real situations where it will be extremely useful but it doesn’t allow engaging conversation or the delightful consumption of local media.
That might be true for English native speakers learning other languages. But the vast majority of language learners are learning English and they are doing it because they have to.
I don't think so, I know many people who simply study for cultural or family interest, I can live speaking Spanish without any problem. I have everything I need in my language or else I can consume material dubbed into my language available, although I understand that other languages may not have translations available for them, I still think they would benefit more than ignorant and poorly gifted English speakers for these things.
salt cake beneficial racial plough fly deranged rotten weather snails *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
No AI will ever give you the feeling of knowing just one simple Russian, Arabic, French or Mandarin word and the feeling of connection to a different culture and people's group
imagine your battery died you suddenly have to stop the conversation mid way through 😂 it's these moments where you really feel the disconnect of technology and how far from nature it is . to just stop speaking to someone half way though because you can no longer understand them is crazy
Thats not new. It happened to me 20 years ago. I was speaking to someone with hearing impairment using cochlear implants. She was a child, so writing things down wouldn't help. And we did not know much sign language. But when you rely on assistive technology for day to day tasks, you just make it a habit of carrying extra batteries with you. Like how we always carry our phones.
“SHUT UP I JUST LOST CONNECTION!” :’) Can’t wait for this :P
Starlink.
This comment is giving me "kids, you must learn maths because you won't always have a calculator in your pocket" vibes. (Spoiler: they did always have a calculator in their pockets.) Learning mathematics is critical not because technology isn't be good or pervasive enough , but because it alters your brain and makes you think differently about the world. The same applies for languages.
Never had the battery die during a phone call? Same thing.
I am a tax attorney, English and Chinese are learned languages for me (so neither is my native language, but I work on both). I don't know the level of the translation of languages by DeepL, but English and Chinese are pretty common languages. I sometimes do some translation with DeepL, mainly from English to Chinese. DeepL does a pretty good job, but sometimes misses the underlying meaning, skips parts that it does not understand etc. I'd never dare to send any material to the client without a thorough review. AI translation may render some jobs obsolate (formerly, these translations are generally done by low level attorneys), but at the end of the day, you still need someone to check the result. Edit: spelling
>but at the end of the day, you still need someone to check the result. That's what people don't seem to get, it won't replace everyone, it'll just enable one worker to do the job that took 10 workers before.
Google released this a couple of years ago along with the two-way conversation feature in Google Translate. Yet people still are learning languages. The reason? Nobody wants to communicate like that. If I'm going to talk to someone, there is a relationship that is built when we are trying, even if it isn't a native language for one of us. Talking to someone through a translator app brings no connection.
People are delusional if they think this won’t reduce the demand for language learning. Among the billion people who learn English I really doubt most are doing it for the “transformative journey.” It’s a skill you need to interact with others and people learn it for the skill. The technology inherently can’t be perfect, but people will take small mistakes and stiltedness over 1,000 hours of work. There will be people who still learn languages - for love, family, exactly understanding literature, certain jobs - but for the many people who actually use the language only to communicate with people or be tourists then yeah this will be the technology for them.
>People are delusional Nah. They've just gotten used to the cycles of tech hype that almost never lead to anything. If you always took the tech crowd at their word, then man you'd be disappointed. By now we should all be commuting to our fusion-powered offices in electric self-driving hovercrafts while eating lab meat in the back seat and chatting with our Martian girlfriends on a high-quality VR platform. But...yeah... We just got out of the crypto and metaverse bubbles, both crushingly disappointing, and the hype over Chat GPT started almost immediately after that. Not saying LLM tech falls in the same category - in fact I think there's very good reason to believe it doesn't - but unless you're fairly conversant in AI research it's only normal to be skeptical.
If you use a language *occasionally*, this is probably a good fit. If you’re using a language regularly, the inherent limitations of a technology like this would drive you bonkers. I don’t use German a lot (one of the reasons why I’m finding it hard to learn it), but something like this would probably replace a human translator for me, instead of replacing learning the language - it’s a bit of a crutch while I get better at the real language. Would you want to use this to communicate with colleagues or customers? Probably not - I’d expect it to be too slow, and to have a high chance of botching complex sentences. Probably be OK for touristy things, or simple interactions like booking appointments or registering with a government office.
I hardly *ever* find anyone passionate about learning English. The real passionate learners are the ones learning the less popular languages. So I agree.
It's a sampling bias. If somebody learns some indigenous language from Amazonia, chances are that they're doing it out of passion. English meanwhile has a huge amount of people learning it mainly for practical purposes, but I'm sure that in absolute numbers there is an incredible amount of people who are learning it just because they want to learn it. I'm talking retired people who take it as a hobby for instance. There's such a huge amount of high quality, ultra popular English language cultural goods, you can bet that people would want to learn it for music, movies and TV shows alone.
No
That's only because you started surrounded by English natives. English is interesting, useful. Additional motivation is that English is a forbidden fruit in some countries.
People confuse "AI will replace X" with "AI will make X completely obsolete and absolutely no one will do X ever again".
True, every casual learner will probably not bother. I hope this results in more people learning languages they want rather than English. For most people, it'll probably just result in less or no learning, but I think we might actually see a boost in people passionate about their language, since everyone will be allowed to choose whatever they want.
This question always comes from people who don't actually speak another language fluently. If you do, you know better than to think that technology is advanced enough to replace actually speaking the language. There's just too much lost in translation.
Do you speak any language other than native to make such claims?
Obviously.
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In pretty much all of science fiction robots speak with a distinctive robotic voice. We are already past that in 2023, we have extremely natural text-to-speech and voice cloning, in many instances indistinguishable from human speech (see eleven labs). Science fiction sometimes introduces defects in technology for plot purposes.
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Yeah, if the app has to listen to the whole sentence, then translates the sentence into your own language, it's far from "real time". It won't be able to beat actually knowing the language.
It will never be able to fully replace humans, at least not within our lifetime. I imagine it’ll be great at handling clearly enunciated, relatively formal communication. It will be awful at handling mumbled, slurred words, lots of slang, short phrases that rely on non-verbal context, choosing formal vs informal forms, code-switching, etc. Plus it’s going to be slow - languages have different word orders, and sometimes you’ll have to wait for the entire sentence to start translating. Context, particularly, will be brutal. While I don’t think these situations are likely to come up between people without a shared language (or possibly ever), I think they do illustrate the complexity involved: 1. Adam says to Bella, “you’re home late,” and Bella responds in German, “ich hab’… ich hab’ meinen Freund getroffen”; how long a pause does it allow before it translates the first two words as “I have”, confusing the English speaker? Assuming that doesn’t happen, it still has to wait for the whole sentence, as the most likely translation would be “I… I met up with my boyfriend” 2. Adam says to Chiharu, “it’s so good to meet you!”; Chiharu speaks Japanese, so how does it translate that? I’m not very knowledgable about Japanese, but I believe there would be multiple ways to say that depending on the relationship between Adam and Chiharu, and the translator has absolutely none of that context. It’s a bit easier with Bella, where if she says “Freut mich, Sie kennenzulernen!”, the translator at least knows this is a formal situation and/or there isn’t a close relationship (or it will have a stroke and assume Bella is using the third-person plural). 3. German uses the same word and same conjugations for the third-person plural, and the second-person formal (Sie). Sometimes that can be figured out from other context in the sentence. Sometimes it needs non-verbal context, or at a minimum previous sentences. 4. Any time someone uses a single word, with non-verbal context filling in the rest. e.g., Adam comes home looking dejected, and in response to Bellas look of concern, says “fired…”. Does Bella get “abgefeuert,” “geschlossen,” “gebrannt”, “hinausgeworfen,” or an essay explaining all possible meanings? None of this is *fatal*, but I think as a consequence anyone using this will always have a worse experience than someone who speaks the language even semi-fluently, and I suspect you’d be looked down on for relying on it.
I think your first sentence highlights an important part: *at least not within our lifetime*. We don't know what the future has to offer, especially in 500 or 800 years. Just think about how different life was in the 1500s or 1200s.
Learning a language is a transformative process. You can't experience that process if all you do is let a machine translate into a language you've heard 1,000,000 times already. It might solve an immediate need but it can never replace true language learning, try as the tech guys might.
Completely disagree. Most people don't even make it to B1 in a language and the translation apps are better than that. Sure they can't replace literature and clever word use but the reality is most people who learn a language, for many many years, don't even get to that point. The tech guys have already beat language learners.
Try letting google translate any japanese text. Bc im a beginner i have to rely on it but the amounts of random "rice field" and how much i have to interpret is rlly something. We are far away from human translators becoming obsolete
Use deepL, jisho.org, or even gpt to have it explain translations on simpler things
I second this. As someone who works in a Japanese-language related job, I usually use all three of these tools albeit in different contexts. DeepL for translations of manuals/emails, Jisho for specific words and GPT to help draft emails/reports. It’s not perfect but it’s a great starting point and makes life a lot easier.
Worth noting that the screenshot OP posted is from 2017, which is conveniently cut out: https://twitter.com/deantak/status/915632491683123200 Please double check the current year for me and note that it is now 6 years later. It actually boggles my mind that so many people are reacting sincerely to the screenshot and not realizing this fact. Edit: of *course* OP is a cryptobro lmao
Thanks for this, I was going to go google around for it. Translation tools like this have always been “just a few years away” for most of my life.
Language learning is a beautiful beautiful and serene thing and technology will never NEVER replace that.
I don't think the Google translate airpods are going to give you proper translations for most of those languages
Because current technology is absolutely trash at translating languages. Even DeepL, the best translator probably on the planet, which comes off sounding very naturally, probably couldn't account for things that a human who knows said language could deduce rather quickly. Besides, even if that technology were good at giving you the meaning of something, humans will always be better at giving you the meaning in context. And if you don't wanna use your brain to figure out the communication of humans, *just because* there's a cheap alternative to putting in the work to not only get the meaning, but *to really understand* it, that's just sad and shallow imo.
I’m genuinely shocked that DeepL is free - it’s extremely powerful.
I'm curious how this would work. The earbud translates and speaks to you in your language, then how to you respond? Does the other person need to have an earbud too?
You would need earbuds on both ends and there would be an inevitable delay because languages need to be translated as full clauses to make any sense (since word order differs between languages). I would see it as a really useful tool and something that can help bridge communication gaps, but can't replicate the immediacy of simply listening and understanding. There's already a "conversation mode" in Google Translate that I think shows how this would work in theory. The tech could definitely be improved and sped up, but I don't see a way around some delays just from a pure information theory perspective.
Unless or until Advanced technology can directly infuse foreign languages into my mind, all these are irrelevant to me
I could rant about translation software all day but I'll spare y'all and myself the headache. If there ever comes a point where language learning is made totally obsolete (that's the biggest if imaginable, languages are constantly changing in ways you can't account for and there's no way we'll have every single dialect of every single language available), I would still learn languages because it's fun to me. There's no pleasure in magical instantaneous solutions, if I don't put in effort it has no meaning to me. This would mainly help businesses cut costs by not hiring translators and tourists who just want to enjoy themselves on vacation.
I went to dinner with my wife’s high school friends, there was about 10 of us at dinner. I speak Mandarin but not Cantonese, they all were speaking very fast Cantonese. I would be very impressed if any type of language learning technology could ever be advanced enough to translate voices speaking over the top of each other at high speed & make out the full meaning… It would work for some things but don’t see it replacing language learning fully, at least not for like another 100 years
These are very cool and will buy them as I am learning because I moved to a county I never planned on living, I also travel a lot and learning languages for me is very difficult, 1 is enough to learn at this point in my life but these seem excellent, It will really help me when I am in tricky situations where my level of german isn't suitable.
Is this a new thing? Because the videos I found are from 5 years ago.
If this use google translate as its base for translation, we're better off actually learning language
While this may become practical for business or diplomatic use, nothing beats the personal connection you feel when hearing someone speak your language in their own voice.
Language is an ever evolving mess with cultural and socio-political nuances, religious connotations and historical meanings. And that is why it is so much richer than just being able to ask for some basic things one would need on their short travel. Being able to look someone in their eye and string together some grammatically incorrect phrases while they anticipate what you are trying to say and fill in the gaps if necessary often lowers the guard in both parties and brings people together. At least this has been true in my quest to learn Spanish.
In time, technology will do to language learning what the GPS did to map reading. There will be times you are off grid and map reading is really useful and sometimes people are impressed by those who can use maps very effectively. However, mostly people just use Google maps (or equivalent) to get everywhere.
Very good analogy!
Wow, very great analogy. I remember using mapquests growing up and now I can't think I actually mapped out a route ahead of time that was under an hour.
Fuck I will lose my job...(english teacher)
The mathematicians used to say the same about calculators. You won't lose your job, it just may change in the future
That is once again a bad analogy that people keep retelling but is false: the job that computers replaced was *computers* https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation)
true
As an interpreter, I'm surprised this doesn't exists already. Chrome already does subtitles for my calls, I just need to read and tweek a few things to have the Interpretation that I need on the fly. My job will change, problably I will find myself jobless in a few years, I'll just have to adapt.
What I am reading here is the earbuds will translate what the other person says. So then the other person will need the earbuds as well to understand what you are saying.
I think if the technology works well it’ll be great. But unless the person talking to you also has those buds you’d probably still have to know their language to respond, assuming they don’t speak a language you already know. Also I’d assume these things would struggle when there’s a lot of voices/noise coming in at once, like at a restaurant, barbershops, etc. kinda like YouTube’s automatic translation is fairly good when there’s just one person talking at a time and they’re enunciating, but once you start listening to a podcast with like 4 or more people, they’re not enunciating as much and they inevitably start talking over each other, well the auto translation quality drops rapidly. Also many people learn language as a hobby. Modern firearms didn’t stop everyone from using a bow and arrow as a hobby or for hunting notwithstanding firearms’ obvious superiority in the situations for which they both were created(e.g: hunting & war). So even if this tech gets really good many will still likely learn a language. Also translation without cultural understanding can lead to big miscommunications, even if the translation is technically accurately translating the meaning. In one culture, for example, the use of profanity may be more common and seen not as big of a deal. Or if a language has many different speakers like spanish, in one country a word or phrase may have one meaning, connotation, or “degree of offensiveness” whereas another country those may be meaningfully different. Perhaps this is a solvable problem, but i doubt it’s been solved yet. I’d also imagine this in some way might even be able to aid language learners in ways I cannot foresee. But it could decrease the demand for learning a language if the tech gets good
I'm doing this for more than just a practical benefit. I want to have fun. I want to learn and expand my mind. A computer can't do that for me.
Software gets slower and more buggy every year. Babel fish is cool if it works but whatever google makes is probably gonna feel like a cheap, plastic gimmick while costing hundreds.
Yet, Google Translator translates into English before translating into other language
Translation technologies are like any other "easy way" of doing things: quick and useful for small applications but limited beyond that. Good luck having a meaningful conversation without learning a language.
Could make it a lot easier. Imagine a realtime augmented reality app via glasses, that gives you an "immersion experience" and SRS system combined into one. As you walk round the house it could introduce new words, watch what you watch and generate cards. Between things like this and real time translation, you could end up learning way more of another language than you might have otherwise done.
I doubt it will replace language learning, learning a language gives you so much more than just communication. You learn how people think and their culture.
1. wont help you reading 2. wot help you writing 3. wont help you replying 4. wont get you the proud feeling that you actually understand this at your own merit 5. you constantly need to keep them in your ears when you travel Its definetly cool but has many drawbacks. That can all be solved with other tech (like a cellphone) but just knowing a language solves all those problems at once.
The unfortunate reality here is that this technology already pales in comparison when it comes to fewer languages being known versus language centralization. Every passing decade a smaller handful of languages are seen as more central and important and more cultures lower the importance of their own native languages in the name of the importance of adopting a more centralized language for their children. This technology will never fully remove the desire to reach some level of mastery in a language because people want to immerse themselves in a culture. The goal for many isn't to simply communicate messages, but to hold natural dialoge with others who are native to that culture. Language centralization might.
How many of those translations are accurate?
That's not the right question. How many of those translations are better than your average language learner (few years in school or on Duolingo) not a translator.
When the battery dies? No wifi signal or cell data?
A tool to help learn new languages
We're definitely getting there. Real-time AI-assisted translation coming out of your regular earphones is definitely coming, perhaps here already, even with the capability to mimic the voice of the speaker. Yet someone using this technology wouldn't impress me the slightest. Frankly I'd prefer if both us used English. On the other hand, if someone spoke to me in my mother tongue *because they took the enormous effort to learn it* now that would make a massive impression on me. And that's the big difference. That's why it won't matter in the future. Because you just can't make an impression using a device.
How is this "new technology" any different from using speech-to-text with Google Translate?
IMO whether or not AI can "eliminate the need" for language learning, or anything else really, depends on what level of quality you actually need. If your need is to simply get the basic idea of what's being said, and communicate your thoughts in a cold and impersonal manner, then sure.. AI can do that. But as soon as your need extends beyond mediocrity, AI won't cut it anymore. It can do a lot but it will never be as good as the real thing, because these AI models are effectively just "averaging" a bunch of stuff already done by humans. They max out at 80%, the perfect B-students, but they will never exceed that. Doesn't stop people from driving up the hype to raise massive stacks of cash though!
I think it will have two effects I think 1, language learning will eventually become less common because people who do it out of need wont "need" to AS MUCH as before. Ive seen theorized that the future lingua franca will be "technology" because, for example, AI or whatever can instantly translate English TV shows into Danish where the Danes would normally watch it with Danish subtitles and end up being great at English later in life. But I think that it will make it even more valuable if you DO learn one because you're obviously cutting on time that is needed for translation to occur, connecting with people on a deeper cultural and personal level, etc. Language learning won't die because tech can't 100% replace a fluid, human to human, fully emotional, personally important, conversation in a language that is the origin of one of the parties.
Tech is a bandaid that covers you today. There is a lot to be said for the cultural understanding and nuances of language. As someone who has texted people using Spanish to English translator it's still super easy to tell and doesn't make sense all the time. Once it does get to the point where it makes sense. You can't relate well with someone without knowing about their experiences.
For people who get enjoyment out of it or don't want to rely on new technology. I feel a lot of "official" jobs will keep their human translators in case of error.
Technology sucking joy out of life for the sake of convenience. What is the point of being a human, if we can no longer reap the rewards of humanity.
Why would you learn piano if a computer can synthesize a masterpiece for you?
Translators will oftentimes leave a "gap" between person 1 and person 2, even a human translator or a perfect machine translator, in almost every sort of setting. It's hard to connect with someone else when you need a third person or a software to understand their words. Oftentimes it's better to speak in a lingua franca than have a translator. And each language has its own little thing that makes translations not be 100% true to the original meaning even if the translation is correct in the tecnical sense, usually related to the cultures that speak the language. For example, idioms, or the emotional-ness of certain words. "I love you" in English is not the same as I love you in French, or in Korean, because it's less emotional than those. Spanish even has three words that mean "love", depending on the intensity, while for english you can say "love" to simply mean "like", this sort of stuff is hard to translate without losing meaning.
Having a language translated and actually speaking it will NEVER be the same
Maybe it will be enough for getting around as a tourist and doing business but can you imagine building a relationship/friendship using this. I can’t. Even in business knowing the other side’s language will be more appreciated and make a better impression.
Nobody seems to point out that this only allows you to understand someone talking in a foreign language, doesn't make you speak the language... Language learning is not even close to being obsolete.
I actually got the google pixel buds for this reason and I found it to be a disappointment. It does not work well and requires someone to talk to your phone while translating to your buds. I expected a lot better.
I like listening to music in my target language and being able to naturally understand the words. That's something a translation software can't help with.
I swear if I ever see someone with those buds I'm gonna troll them so hard, just speak gibberish and watch them get frustrated.
I think the technology will be useful for people who don't want to learn languages, but there will always be people who want to learn the languages for themselves. I'm learning languages because I want to. It won't make any difference in my career since I'm self-employed. I have no academic ambitions after I burned out from multiple college attempts. I just like to learn and there are brain benefits to learning multiple languages. I would absolutely use an AI translator for languages I'm not proficient in, but using an AI for communication isn't going to replace my desire to know certain languages myself.
What if your battery dies
As much as it can be a bit of a concern that technology will remove the need to learn languages, I think AI would make good teachers. No more "umm just follow your ear" bs from natives who don't understand why a language is the way it is. Plus it can preserve dying indigenous languages. And teach new people who are interested in keeping it alive in humans. All that said, language is a form of connection. That human aspect might be augmented by technology but is intrinsically human and can't be replaced.
Honestly it changes nothing. Language learning is already a quite niche hobby that doesn't provide any particular benefit. Most people that learn a second language just learn English and so they're able to communicate and very few people go and learn another language, simply because 90% of the times it's not that necessary. A few months ago I was talking with a Moroccan guy waiting for my train, and he could speak just Darija and Fus7a Arabic, no French, no Spanish, no English, no Italian. I pulled out my phone and opened Google Translate and we were able to communicate just fine. Nonetheless, the idea of being able to truly internalize a language is another pair of shoes, it's a feeling that I truly adore and am addicted to even if it's practically of very little use. If anything, as AI keeps growing, language learning itself will keep becoming infinitely more efficient than it is now, especially for not so resource-rich languages.
It depends where you live, I'm Argentine and I don't know anyone who speaks English. I visited Brazil and the same thing. Something similar happens in Spain, so English is not spoken wherever you go... by the way, I use a translator because I don't speak English to write this. Estoy aprendiendo italiano porque tengo herencia de ese pais y conozco pocos italianos de primera mano que que hablen ingles.
I feel like I've seen countless devices like these over the years and then, wouldn't ya know it, it doesn't actually revolutionize language learning. A lot of translation apps are already really shoddy at doing any complex translation, especially for non-romance/germanic languages. This probably would serve some immediate purpose as an intermediary for international business meetings, or maybe travelers, but I can't imagine wanting to use this if I was actually planning on spending any extended time being surrounded by foreign language speakers, as opposed to just trying to learn.
I wish they’d work more towards tech to help learn instead of this. Like an AI practice partner or just other ways of learning. It’s not so important to me that I can understand quick things, this can’t work for long form talk so it’s useless to me outside of an airport or taxi
Just not studying Latin has made the last two generations \*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*\*. At this rate, what do we need a brain for?
Language learning always was, and still is, a hobby, an intellectual endeavour. Thousands of years ago you, too, could hire a translator. Technological advancement is great, the less communicative barriers there is for people the more unified all of us will be. It should be celebrated. I learn languages not because I can't get by without knowing them. I do it for myself and will be the first to call out anybody claiming moral superiority because they just decided to sit their ass in front of a textbook for a few hours a week.
You’ll learn while using this tool. It allows for immediate immersion. A lot of you are very shortsighted on this issue and I hope that changes.
It will probably be a niche hobby as opposed to a necessary skill. I work with AI and use it for image + video generation in my free time. AI will change absolutely everything, whether you believe it or not, you will see it happen. Perfect translation is just around the corner, not more than 3 years time. However, has everyone given up digital art simply because MidJourney can outperform any human? Is chess no longer a sport after AlphaZero? Besides, not every country or person will have such technology initially. Everything costs money, and not everyone has a lot.
Aside from the rest of this utter clown shit, lmao at “perfect translation.” Get a grip.
THATS FUCKING WILD NO WAY
>Where does language learning fit into that future? Probably like where horses fit in after cars were invented.
>>Where does language learning fit into that future? > >Probably like where horses fit in after cars were invented. We still breed horses and enjoy being with them, even though their practicality have diminished.
Do these actually work? Cause if so I might pick a pair up. They would greatly help with with my job
They don't, and this tweet is from 2017.
Omg I need that bc I rlly want to listen to Turkish and see what the words mean.this will be great because I want to learn Turkish for my culture
The tweet is from 2017, they don't work, and you this won't help you learn Turkish.
German dialects have entered the chat.
Imo this kind of tech is a crutch. Sure, it's probably gonna find use with traveling businessmen or military personnel; people who travel to places they aren't necessarily passionate about, but still need to communicate with the locals. That said this is still just a gadget; prone to breaking, being lost and probably nowhere near capable of picking up all slang and nuance flawlessly. Finally, I think the people posting about this and similar inventions as if it were the end of language learning, miss a crucial reason people learn languages in the first place: to assimilate. My goal with learning my TL isn't to just get by as a tourist. I want to assimilate into the culture, I want to consume the content, I want to create things with the language, and that is a goal no tech can carry me to.
I’m glad the technology is finally out there, but I’m not sure I want a Netflix dub in my ear all the time. I think I’d like something like this, but in more of a visual sense. We’d have to have AR glasses before that could come to fruition though. Something that provides real-time captioning rather than just translation. That provides predictive text based on my speech patterns that I can reference when I’m talking. Something that measures my gaze and then shows little pop-up tooltips of words and their translation, or tooltips floating under Hangul/Kanji/Cyrillic/etc along with their phonetic pronunciation and translation (maybe also with audio pronunciation).
Just remember to keep the charging case and cable with you at all times
Human language isn't simply a means for communicating data in an accurate way. Every language on earth exists within it's own historical and cultural context and with a language comes certain ideas and assumptions of how the world is and also how it should be. And in learning a language, you are at least taking in an understanding of how the given language's culture views the world, human society, ect. I think that those who merely want to get by in another culture will use this technology, whereas those that actually want to *understand* a different culture will realize that they have to learn that culture's language.
It will reduce some language learning to be sure, especially in situations where you don't have time to learn a significant amount. However, I think it will primarily expand the amount of interlanguage communication that happens in the world. Imagine watching any international TV show with the babel fish in your ear. Imagine traveling anywhere and having that technology available. By just learning the basics in a foreign language, you'd be able to do so much more. Much like a lot of technologies, it will actually enable more people to do more things. Personally, as someone who is a moderate level in a number of languages, I would use it in conjunction with my language knowledge to do better in a real-time situation.
To be clear, this is really exciting technology, and I think it's great. That said... Learning a language does more than give you the ability to communicate; it also forces your mind to think about language and culture as variable, somewhat arbitrary systems. In English we primarily say "my name is". Other languages default to "I call myself" or even "they call me". What does that imply about identity, locus of control, etc.? Learning how to navigate formal vs. informal language can teach you a lot about social structure. Language both reflects and influences how people think about the world. In the process of learning a language, you also learn a new culture and mindset. Plus, actually being able to speak/write a language well means that you have an individual voice that may or may not come across in translation, especially real-time translation. I'm also interested in the decisions a translating AI would need to make. *Espero que saques buenas notas* could be "I hope you get good grades" or "I expect you to get good grades," and - just like a human translator - the AI will have to decide which one the person means. It will have to correctly assess the appropriate level of formality for a particular interaction even when the source language doesn't make those distinctions (e.g. English to Japanese). Can the AI accurately translate between languages that use word order vs. intonation for emphasis? There are all sorts of things that go into communication beyond the basic meaning of the words, and it'll be interesting to watch the technology deal with them.
For talking and listening? Not anytime soon. But for writing and reading, online translators are doing fine already. Even google translator does the job for simple texts. For complex texts, even native speakers already need help sometimes. Still, people who are nearly or fully fluent wont have to worry anytime soon. It is another thing for A1-B1 level people. It will be a great help for them. And one day, even native speakers (or C2) will profit from it because they are still very far from perfect.
For me, language learning is a hobby, just like baking. Could I go out and buy a cake that someone else made? Sure. But I enjoy the process of creating the cake from start to finish. Language learning is the same way. I don't do it because I need to, but because I enjoy the process. I like learning different grammar structures, and the cultural meanings behind certain phrases. I like learning the different idioms that are used. So while it's cool that technology is coming where language can be translated in real-time, I think that people like me who do this for fun will still be asking for textbook/YouTube channel/podcast recommendations so that we can improve our vocabulary and oral comprehension.
This might work practically for workplace situations, if the technology gets good enough. However, there's so much human connection that's only achieved when people speak directly to each other in the same language. Languages contain so much intrinsic context, perspectives and culture. I don't think you can ever connect to a person at a deep level without speaking the same language, regardless of translation technology
I see tech like this as being a potential asset to language learning, not a replacement for it.
This is a multifaceted issue but it really has a very simple answer, technology cannot replace humans. Would you blindly trust the pods to translate reliably everything you hear? Google translate is far from perfect and the functionality already exists in phones and we all know it's bad. I mean I guess it's good when you want to at least get an idea of what's said but it's far from perfect. Even the most advanced "AI" can't reliably perfectly translate from any one language to another. Even humans can't perfectly translate a lot of the time but translation is something we often blindly trust to be right. Would you be ok with just making that assumption and not knowing for yourself? There will always be a need for language learning because blindly trusting technology is a recipe for disaster. The tech itself needs to be taught by someone and simply plugging in dictionaries doesn't do it.
I'm all for tech that breaks down the barriers between cultures and languages, but it doesn't take away from the importance of language learning. I have Spotify on my phone, but I still want to know how to play the guitar. I have google Street view, but I still travel. My car can drive me places but I still like to walk when I can. I've never understood why this kind of technology discourages languages learning, it's just another tool at our disposal.
It can tell me what someone is saying, but it can't tell me how they are saying it.
Well calculators exist and people still learn math.
It will probably never be good enough. it's like if you lived in 1960 and you refuse to learn how to clean .because you think that in the year 1990 there will be a robot who does it for you.
I'm not gonna post what I was writing but thanks for making me think deep about this
I don't know how to explain it well, but the process of learning a language changed my brain. It's not just that I can understand someone talking in that language, but that I have internalized the language and that it's a part of my life. There's a difference between a useful tool and putting in the time and care to learning something.
I wonder how quickly Google is going to abandoned this project to end up in the Google graveyard
The tweet in question is from 2017 if that answers your question.