A new article on Omniglot discusses the future of language learning. The writer (not me) suggests that improvements in technology will soon make it possible to use machine translation in everyday situations and as a result, learning languages will become unnecessary and something people do for mainly as a hobby.
I don’t really agree with the article. Improved machine translation will be very useful for tourists and other short-term visitors to foreign parts, but for people who live abroad or spend a lot of time in foreign lands, learning the local language and about the local culture will always be useful and worthwhile.
Translation, no matter how good, adds an extra step between the speaker and the listener. For those of us who prefer direct interaction with people, and who like to fully understand what other people are talking about, including their idioms, jokes and slang, there’s no substitute for learning their language.
Even if a babel fish or similar device existed, i.e. something that translates whatever language you hear into your own language, and that translate what you say into your conversation partner’s language, it would still be worth learning about other and languages cultures. Or would it?
Also, machine translation is not that easy. Sometimes the meaning of a word depends on context, and the context is not in the words themselves, but in the surrounding world.
Could be, but I’m sceptical. I’m 72, and I can’t remember a time when virtually perfect machine translation wasn’t predicted to be about 5 years in the future. Nowadays Google Translate is pretty good for some languages, such as Hausa, into English, and remarkably bad for others that one might guess would be easier, such as French and Spanish. If you ever need to know what an article in Hausa is about you’ll be pleasantly surprised, but if you need to read one in French or Spanish you won’t.
Here is my impression as an interested but casual observer of these things. Attempts to teach machines to interpret languages were predicted, as Athel notes, to be coming soon, but failed utterly. Google essentially gave up on them and replaced it with what they do best, brute computing force—Google Translate now is the product of a large corpus of parallel texts. This improved the product, but it has limitations, and probably always will.
Am I correct in this?
Jim – that’s how Google Translate works, as far as I know. I’ve heard that some translation systems, possibly including Google, are starting to use artificial intelligence. It remains to be seen whether this will produce better results.
I agree with those above– near-perfect machine translation is still very far off. If it was possible, I think think it will be culturally important to learn languages. People like to feel connections, whether it’s with business or with personal relationships, and I don’t think machines are going to be able to fill in that gap as easily as others might think. I think the *real* way the language barrier is not so intimidating anymore is that, with the internet, learning languages is easier than ever, and more people can afford to do it.
Software has already come a long ways in the realm of language translation… Google Translate today supports 90 languages and serves over 200 million people daily. And it’s free!
As computer continue to advance (exponentially), they will replace more human translators…
http://jobsreplaced.com/2016/01/24/learning-a-new-language-stop-it-today/
But still learning a new language increases your thought process and creativity. Studying different languages changes the way you think and act.
In English, anytime you think about the future you must change your verb. For example, it snowed… it is snowing… it will snow. In Chinese you would hear… yesterday it snowed… today it snowed… tomorrow it snowed.
English forces you to think about time differently. Changing the verb constantly distances you from the future. It makes the future feel different than the present. This makes it harder to save.
http://kehmresearch.com/2016/03/09/how-language-impacts-your-saving-habits/
I have no doubts that this technologies will be very popular. Now people become more lazy, they want to get skills right here and right now, so it will be the easiest way to communicate.
But I don’t like it, because we cannot learn true culture of different nations, so I can describe these technologies as ‘soulless’, which can not bring a lot of benefits.