Last year, Hilary Clinton’s former innovation adviser Alec Ross wrote an article in The Wall Street Journal about being language barriers soon to be history. He stated that “By 2025 when someone speaks to you in a foreign language, an earpiece will be able instantly to translate their words into your native language”. Ross also wrote that machines will grow exponentially more accurate and be able to fill in the communication gaps in areas including pronunciation and interpreting a spoken response.
Most recent developments on Ross’ prediction might be the Google Pixel Buds. The wireless earbuds are an alternative to Apple’s pioneering AirPods. The most interesting feature of the earbuds is the universal translator, “Star Trek” style as the company calls it themselves. As you speak into the Pixel Buds, your words get translated and spoken aloud by your phone in another language. Google claims that this feature works with over 40 languages. For now, the feature is only available for Pixel 2 phones, however, the feature will soon be available for other phones too.
However, communication is only one of the many advantages of learning another language and probably not the most important one. Studies show that beneficial advantages are including increasing creativity, increasing confidence and makes you become smarter.
While it’s undeniable that translation tools like Bing Translator, Google Translate, or Babelfish have improved dramatically in recent years, prognosticators like Ross could be getting ahead of themselves. An increase in the quantity and accuracy of the data logged into computers should make them more capable of advanced translating, however, many tools (like Google Translate) still perform way worse than traditional translators, stumbling on what seems like easy translations.
We can assign this to the fundamental difference between programming and language. Programming is a conducted, formal language, while languages are natural and breathing, which rely on the social convention as on syntactic, phonetic, or semantic rules. Translation is difficult for computers because translating words, sentences or paragraphs is only part of the process. The most important aspect is translating meaning.
So will technology someday replace human translators and interpreters? I don’t think that this will be realized in the near future. Language barriers felt a long time ago when professional translators and interpreters have been facilitating multilingual communication for decades. Unless developers find a way to breathe a soul into computers, the “high-tech earpiece” will not be able to replace human intervention. The technology should for now be seen as a way to help to deal with scarce resources of translators and to speed up their work by, for example, automatically replacing strings of texts which have been already translated.
Sources
https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2016/0468/BillText/e1/HTML
https://newrepublic.com/article/132148/language-barrier-actually-fall-within-next-10-years
https://www.fluentu.com/blog/advantages-of-learning-a-foreign-language/
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-language-barrier-is-about-to-fall-1454077968
Hi Leonie,
Thank you for the interesting blog post!
Technology is awesome! Recently I came across a YouTube video about the translating device “ili” that can easily translate sentences for you while travelling. Please check it out:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=18&v=rIiGyn_HfcI
I think this kind of devices will rapidly develop in the next coming years, especially due to the advances in AI. I agree with you that the current technology is not developed enough yet, and it will take years to develop the perfect translating device. It will be particularly hard to translate and imitate sarcasm, jokes, tone of voice, gestures etc.
However, for translating documents I think it is possible to replace human translators and interpreters in the near future. I would even argue that it is already happening; the current translating tools available already simplify the translating process. Consequently, less organizations use translators for simple translating jobs, and translators spend less time translating documents (because of increased efficiency). Moreover, I think these translating tools will become more dominant over the next couple of years. Eventually, I think software will do the biggest parts of translating documents, and a translator will only have to go over it to check for some mistakes.
Hey Leonie,
Really interesting blog post! And wow! Having been living in the Netherlands now for just over 2 months and still having a very basic understanding of Dutch, this is a very encouraging technology indeed! I’m curious whether you think this kind of technology will be used to replace learning languages completely or whether you think it will supplement learning until fluency is achieved.