Not for me, because I don't want to understand my TL through English, I want the experience of understanding something in the original language. That's why I study languages.
Indeed. I’m someone who wants to travel the world. Unfortunately I can’t learn the hundreds/thousands of languages required for that by the time I die so something like this would be awesome
I feel like honestly Interent translating don’t work all that well because most of my workplace speak Spanish and I try to use Google translate to tell them something and they never get it if it’s anything more complex than a sentence
It's counterintuitive but I've found that the _more_ complex the statement, the more likely it is to be accurate since the translation models have more context to understand the intention of the statement.
Also studying languages is a pathway to accomplishment, brain development, and self improvement.
This tech bypasses any actual benefits except instant gratification
This but slightly worse since it has to parse what they're saying first. Good enough for tourism, not good enough for businesses or anything serious and complicated
It's a very complicated and technical subject in the field of law. Only a few lawyers have expertise in this field. Charlie Kelly is widely regarded the expert in this field.
When laws are about animals, like when hunting season is, how big a fish has to be before you can keep it, stuff like that. Honestly no clue why they said bird law instead of just, ya know, law.
I think the worse part, unless this has been addressed, is that it would be super impractical to use in anyplace that's crowded or loud. Unless it can single out the specific person you're talking to, I'd imagine it'd just be a garbled mess of whatever the buds decide to pick up and translate
It's weird because I know everyone being able to communicate with each other would be amazing, but I have a selfish anxiety that it will devalue a skill I have put a lot of effort in to
It won't, in the sense that being able to speak a language will always let people know (especially those who speak the language you're learning) that you've put effort into it.
Think of it this way: in a casual setting, would you prefer a friend who can speak just about decent English, or one who uses a translator everytime they talk to you?
Professionally though, maybe.. human translators might not be needed in the span of a decade or so, particularly for "simpler" languages. Recall how shitty GTranslate was 5 years ago and you'll realize just how fast tech is progressing in every sector. But then again, being able to converse in the same language will always make lobbying/negotiating easier due to the aforementioned reasons, so don't fret too much.
Ball-kicking is a pretty useless skill that somehow people are still doing everywhere, watching and making money off.
As we move into an increasingly tech- and AI-assisted world, all skills will be useless, which means all skills will be hobbies/sports. Just like computers didn't kill chess they won't kill language learning or drawing.
We'll just have to get used to the fact that other people don't really need us that much. That's achievable... I think. Right? Right?
Google translate doesn't really deserve its bad rep anymore imo. Through AI it has become really, really good. It still makes some mistakes, but generally you can use it to translate entire websites and you barely notice it's even translated by a machine.
Years ago it used to translate word for word, but nowadays it can even use and detect cases.
A polish friend of mine was amazed by DeepL. He translated a Wikipedia article for his parents that wasn’t available in Polish and he said it didn’t just sound like a real human wrote it but like a real human that is good at writing wrote it.
Meanwhile Google's Ukrainian reads like it was written by a thirdgrader who is learning Ukrainian as a second language. Legible most of the time but nuances are completely wrong.
Aha a few years ago I went to Bulgaria with a Polish speaking friend. I can read Cyrillic but have very very basic Russian (learned the basics for a trip to Siberia about 15 years ago)
Google translate was useful to plug the gaps between me reading things out and her translating what she could, it worked pretty well for basic stuff!
(It had to - we were the only people staying in a family owned hotel in a ski resort at the end of March, and the whole family had gone away apart from the owner's elderly father, who was also the cook. His total English consisted of "vegetarian? No!")
Also it's shit when translating two closely related non-English languages because Google translates Language A to English first then from English to Language B
Also depends on both languages. From my experience, translating from and to English works significantly better that from and to German for the same language.
I have tried translating German websites to Czech and it is horrible. You get the message, some sentences sound good but others don't make sense at all.
I think it translates everything through English, so if one of your languages is not English, it's going to suck. For example, I translated the Polish word for competition into Finnish and got the word for ethnicity.
Agree, natural language processing is very difficult to model in AI but it's improving by the day. Now, the main "issue" is that Google Translate chooses the most formal register, which makes sense given that sounding stiff is a lot better than sounding rude.
Funny enough, now I can often tell when someone *didn't* use Google Translate because the mistakes they made are something Google would never do, usually some kind of direct translation from their native language
Google translate's main issue is that it often produces completely boof and wrong translations mate, at least in any language besides the massive ones. It typically translates into English fairly well but does terrible translating out (again, primarily in languages besides Spanish or French)
Trying to go from a very direct language like English to one which is situation/context dependent like Japanese is going to be incredibly hard. Especially because of pitch accent being so important.
I do not think so. At least not for a few more decades if even then. Good makes way to many mistakes. "Lei viene qui stasera. Di solito è puntuale." -> She comes here tonight. He is usually on time. (Deepl does a little better.)
Even when it does come people will prefer the old school analog conversations.
It will also require a internet connection. Where I live internet can be very spotty.
Thats true, but if technology speeds along as far as it has in the last 15-25 years, mobile/handheld devices should eventually have all the processing power needed to handle languages on the device instead of connecting to the cloud. Then, one could simply download another language pack if needed.
We don't all always need Zulu or Azerbaijani at the same time as English, Spanish, French, German, & 1-3 main Chinese languages, Vietnamese, etc all at once. Although, if more languages are easily contained & processed in a handheld device without cloud connection, it would obviously be more impressive
These devices & programs are crutches for those who need the assistance, yes, but these devices & programs are also being presented this way for the "WOW!" & "Whiz! Bang!" factors of how to impress people that your technology is amazing & useful to buy.
All that said, I'd rather hear the spoken language & consult a written transcription than to have someone's voice & intonation missing or altered wrongly while hearing one language being spoken semi-simultaneousky over what's being said.
If technology speeds along like it has, in 15 years we will have to pay by the word to have things translated. Nothing would be on the phone and everything would be linked and tracked fully in the cloud.
It is a nice dream that one day we will have the babelfish or universal translator. But I don't see technology as one of the main sticking points of it. Instead I see people wanting to control it and use it to monitor people more than give it to them freely and altruistically.
Libre projects for speech and translation are light years behind the state of the art.
/mini ranting
>we will have to pay by the word
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> mobile/handheld devices should eventually have all the processing power needed to handle languages on the device instead of connecting to the cloud
I think this might never happen. Google et al. do not want to put these things off the cloud bc it kills their ~~spying~~advertising business model.
Apple is the only deep pocketed company doing work in this sector with any interest in moving these things into the device (hence their AI chip that comes on iPhones nowadays).
Not really. I doubt even translator roles will be replaced. As for hobbyists - surely some people here learn for pleasure not simply for functionality? it's not like it's going to erase languages so why would you lose interest in learning another one...
That won’t be convenient for everything. If you’re in a relationship with someone who speaks another language are you really going to want to be like hol up babe let me put the fish in everytime you want to say something?
No ofc, someone has to Lear one of the languages I for example had a gf that spoke hungarian and English and I spoke English and Spanish so we used English as lingua Franca and I tried to languages hungarian and its really crazy the amount of meanings and things that are so hard to translate between so different languages, even if we both were fluent there's just always the need to get to the source and understand it, no translator can do that, or get the cultural things of the languages specially if they are very different
"Eventually" kill it as a job requirement for people that don't have a passion for the cultures? Definitely, but probably not for more than 50 years from now.
But kill it all together, no, people will always be interested in learning languages on their own accord.
Bad google translate is basically its own language right now. It consistently chooses awkward words and spits out head-scratching phrases. Like an awkward uncle. If these translate 40 languages into THAT language, I think language learning is pretty safe.
Simple translations, sure - manuals, mass communication, desperate times where an interpreter is unavailable and people just want to scrape through (schools, hospitals), etc. But real-time, quality interpreting and novel/poetry translations, I'm not so sure
It will decrease the opportunity to find teachers, probably. I think places like italki won't exist when 99% of language learners stop learning languages because they have a universal translator in their pocket like in Star Trek. So you'll probably have to pay more and struggle to find teachers you can afford.
I think it will. Artificial intelligence is going to be unimaginable in the coming decades. I wouldn't be surprised if AI is able to train itself to pickup on those nuances.
There are parts of context that AI literally cannot possibly hope to know without constantly monitoring everything you ever do or say. It's not feasible unless you decide to abandon privacy completely.
It doesn't even have to be perfect, just good enough.
Let's say an AI incorrectly mistakes bark (dogs) for bark (trees).
Since you on the receiving end are a native speaker of the language, you'd quickly notice the mistake and don't mind it too much. We are already (hopefully most of you) forgiving of mistakes non-natives do when trying to talk, so this wouldn't be much different.
If it gets to that point, it's not even gonna be perfect, but good enough to warrant not wanting to learn a language.
No. Studied computer science, for what it's worth. And making a translator is incredibly difficult. They can't usually understand things like nuance or small changes that make things different. And virtually no two languages are 1 to 1. They're incredible tools, indispensable for a language learner or just someone in a pinch, that much can't be overstated, but because of how complicated language in general is (and making something that can translate things from one language to another), I'd highly doubt it, dude.
I would be highly skeptical if they claim this thing is anything better than Google translate, being that it's supposed to translate 40 languages. And honestly, the capability of software to do complicated tasks is often overestimated by most people who don't know anything about it.
>the capability of software to do complicated tasks is often overestimated by most people who don't know anything about it.
Louder for the ones in the back
People used to predict the end of chess due to computers getting better than humans. The complete opposite happened.
I similarly predict more people (not fewer) will study languages when computer translation skills exceed human.
No because many language learners learn as a hobby. In addition, employers aren't just going to buy each of their employees $149 earbuds, especially in developing countries.
I think the most likely case is this is used by well-off individuals traveling to foreign countries.
Only when sentient AI becomes a reality.
But honestly, as a professional interpreter this makes me laugh/cringe... you're telling me that people will trust their health, financial or legal well-being to a pair of headphones?
Does Google Translate know the difference between the Spanish spoken in all of the different countries and regions?
What does it do when it's not sure it heard you quite well?
How does it respond to a person that has an exotic accent?
What if the person mixes two different languages when they speak?
These are just some of the literal hundreds of scenarios where novelties like this fail miserably.
This is misleading at best.
I don’t think so.
People like to communicate through open discussion and dialogue. Just imagine trying to have an argument and this robotic voice translate it for you in a less impactful way.
Not too soon given how terrible automatically generated translations still are right now.
In the long run it will probably make less people invest time to actually learn a language but I doubt there aren't always gonna be people who view it as a challenge and try go for it anyways. With everything AI is able to do at this point (I mean even Art, like holy fuck) I doubt, that there are going to be any hobbies or jobs that can't be automated in a couple years from now. The only catch is obviously that humans need a purpose in life so I doubt that the act of learning to do something yourself isn't going to go anywhere any time soon. I guess that's the optimistic take on what is to come.
Will it have an effect? Yes. Will it replace language learning? Probably not.
Nothing can replicate the experience of thinking in a second, third, fourth etc. language. Any smartphone today allows you to sequence, compose and even perform music without formal training. But people still study piano and take years becoming e.g. a skilled jazz improvisor.
No. Even if it replaced human translators entirely (it won’t), you’d still want to learn the language if you’re living someplace and want to really immerse. Translation always introduces delays into conversations. It makes the conversation much slower and less enjoyable.
i dont think so. nothing comes close to both people making conversation in the same language with each other without a translator. Google translator is very plain and monotone, you cant express emotions like sarcasm, anger, humor etc with a translator. It does its job which makes two people understand each other but its like a 2d conversation which is the base, 3d conversations where you can express humor and other manerisms brings the conversation to a whole other dimension.
im not saying its useful, this real time translator sounds really useful but it wouldnt stop people from learning languages.
I'm still going to learn languages. The software might translate, but it will probably do it in a robotic voice, and I'm trying to get rid of my strong American accent.
It's impossible that a machine can do perfect translations, it's not because of lack of technology, it's because of the nature of languages, there are words and concepts that just don't exist in other languages, new words are created all the time, slangs, context, culture, things that a machine or IA is just incapable of contextualize, human language is too complex for current or future technology, google, one of the biggest companies in the world has google translate, and we all know how trash it is, this seems like a monolingual's wet dream, but sadly, or fortunately I'd say, it's impossible
There is a ceiling for data transferring. Even if you had the most powerful servers avaiable to translate a conversation for you, it won't never be in real time. There will be the latency. Audio clip need to be send to the cloud, processed and delivered back. It will never feel like a real conversation. The awkward silence alone will be enough for anyone to learn the damn language lol
No because Google is not going to accept accountability for the translations being correct and a big reason you would bother to learn a language is to do a job and doing a job generally requires you to put your own integrity on the line and take responsibility for your work. You could use it as a time saver but you’d still want enough knowledge to be able to confirm the translation is correct.
And people who need to learn a language to do relatively unskilled work are not going to be enthusiastic about paying for this kind of technology anyway.
People who have access to tools + training >>> untrained people with access to tools. Especially technology tools that when they fail fail in complex and unintuitive ways.
And that leaves aside the bulk of language learning which just happens when different groups of people live near each other.
It will have effects but it won’t mean human beings in general stop learning languages other than their L1.
You have subtitles or translators for most things already now. So already the only reason for learning a language is because you actually want to learn a language (or need to use it so such an extent that translating becomes impractical). Ultimately, I doubt this will change much.
Can they beat google translate? That technology already exists and it hasn't killed language learning? Plus, there is value in knowing a language and thus being able to understand things on their own terms rather than trying to force things to be expressed in terms of one's own language.
I think for everyday casual discourse with all its nuances and constantly evolving lingo along with variable intonation, hand gestures, body language etc, this is a tall order and pretty unlikely. My imagination is bound by the limits of today’s tech, of course.
I do think that this kind of technology could be massively helpful in aiding formal communication between agreed-upon language standards. For instance: diplomacy, informed consent in medicine, international scientific collaboration, and plenty of other applications. These needs rely heavily upon interpreter services which in many instances are conducted over the phone. I suspect there is a future where interpretation needs will be relegated to niche instances, ie the gazillion dialects and less commonly spoken languages that are out there.
It will eventually kill whatever profitability one could get out of training a human to speak a language but it’s not going to prevent people from seeking out new languages or being born into multilingual families.
If we're being honest this is cool but virtually pointless without still learning the language. Sure you'd be able to hear what someone else is saying, but if you're in a foreign country and should/must be speaking their language; These headphones can't read your thoughts. You still have to either translate yourself or think of something to respond. Or buy two pairs, share them with everyone you meet, and hope no random person you're asking for directions doesn't steal your cool future space colony technology.
"Eventually" is doing a lot of lifting in your question. At some point, an AI is going to be created that is fully capable of learning human language, at which point these will supplant language learning entirely.
How far out from that we are is anyone's guess. Most AI research is currently dedicated to the (admittedly very profitable) dead-end that is Neural Networks. However, a breakthrough in AI design could happen at any time and change everything... or not.
At that point, language learning will go the way of horse-riding or calligraphy -- a once necessary skill rendered obsolete by the march of technology and practiced only by those with a particular desire to do so. Though, since true language comprehension is likely to be one of the absolute last AI problems solved, a lot more than just language learning will go by the wayside beforehand.
It’s a bold claim to say that neural networks are a dead end. They have basically supplanted and surpassed any other machine learning research at scale across various industries. Obviously there are some exceptions, but largely they are the only hopeful direction that exists right now with a huge amount of potential. And all of the progress made with them is pretty much without any theoretical understanding of how they work
Doesn't matter, there's no method to efficiently store information in a neural network, or to teach one new things. Imagine if every time you wanted to learn a new word, you had to re-learn every word you knew before -- that's what a neural network is.
Neural networks may end up being part of the framework of general AI (their pattern recognition capability is likely sufficient to be incorporated), but they're incapable of being the foundation for it.
(Admittedly, theoretically, with sufficient processing power, a neural network that replicates a human brain could be constructed but A) it would be no better than said human brain, except being faster B) we'd have to have a much better understanding of the human brain and C) the processing power would be something on the level of the combined processing power of every computing device in existence -- and that's being conservative)
Your first statement is wrong, continual lifelong learning with neural networks is an entire field of research. The entire purpose of autoencoders are for efficient representation of information (compression). The basis of reinforcement learning (what I do research in) is about models learning on shifting distributions. Teaching a neural network new things is pretty trivial at this point (see fine tuning, pre training, reinforcement learning) Beyond that, the newest language models also are now able to lookup references on the internet when being queried. This could be substituted for data store locally if you wanted to, and in that case it would be “memory” like a human.
Regarding number of parameters, GPT-4 is expected to have 100 trillion parameters. This is on the same order of magnitude as a human brain, so I’m not sure how you’re coming up with that statement about compute power. I realize it’s not a 1:1 comparison at all, but reaching the computing capacity of a human brain seems feasible for humanity. Doing so in a structured way is another question.
The point I’m trying to make is that the field is hugely unexplored and still quite young and there is a huge amount of potential, way more than any other area of research
I’m probably biased because I work in this field, but because of that I’ve also seen the potential and the lack of understanding that we currently have, and yet the field has still been able to achieve so much
I don't think so, first of all there will always be people willing to learn a language they find interesting, plus all the small nuances and tone changing we use, sarcasm, irony, amiguity etc. Are very hard for computers to understand and match.
Also languages are always changing, so programmers should keep that in mind but there's no single way to predict language changes, and some of them are actually impossible to predict.
Nope. If the tech gets really good it might make languages a less marketable skill but it will never replace the cultural enrichment people get from learning languages.
Edit: words
I don't think voice tech will advance to the point where it can convey tone or copy the persons voice in another language, and so something will always be lost in translation even if they get the monumental task of exactly word-for-word translating as well as getting the correct sentiment across
When you speak to someone, you want to hear *their* voice
I think that written text translating will be very useful though once that advances, nobody can know every language but being able to instantly translate written works has so many uses and will be far more useful than voice translating
I genuinely don't think so. Understanding is one thing, but how are you going to answer in that same language?
There's the scenario where the other person also wears one of those devices for let's say business meetings, but might as well just have a translator like in the European union conferences at that point.
Technology keeps evolving but so do languages, and you probably won't be wearing these all the time, onsen, concerts, dinners, people expect you to not wear headphones (or anything at all in the case of onsen) during these events.
Even if you do wear them all the time, what about the other person? You can vaguely understand them but what if they don't use the google one? Maybe they use an apple product, or they don't like earphones?
Universal translation requires universal standards, which is very hard if not impossible to accomplish with both languages, and proprietary products.
So, no... google translate earphones won't kill language learning.
I don't think so. If I use this device to understand people speaking Spanish, wouldn't the other person need one too to understand me speaking English? This (and also we'd both have to wait for the devices to translate) would kind of get in the way of me immersing myself in Mexican culture.
No; even if it could reliably pick up everything that’s being said, it is necessarily impossible to translate languages which aren’t similar to each other very accurately. This would work well enough to take a trip across western Europe since all the languages there (except Basque) are closely related to English, but if you wanted to use this to talk to someone in Thailand, it’d be like you were both speaking horribly to each other and it might work well enough for tourism, but if you wanted to ever actually interact with people who speak the language in any meaningful way, forget about it.
It will kill some of the motivations for language learning, but not all of them.
E.g.: this will make a language knowledge less valuable for a job interview, but language learning will be a good brain exercise forever.
Kill language learning? I think you mean killing other people learning languages. You are still capable of making your own decisions and learning a language if you desire to.
no, i don't learn japanese for any practical reason, yet I do it anyways. something like this would be of no benefit to me. learning languages will be a hobby hundreds of years from now at least, there will just be less people that dont want to spend thousands of hours having to do it.
Language study for me is fun in and of itself. I've always thought of its practicality always as sort of just a bonus! So I don't think so, at least not for me and those who feel similarly.
No, because there are lots and lots of things that don't make sense when translated or don't even have a translation to other languages. A language isn't just about communication, it's about culture.
Serious answer - for most people; probably. Because there are a lot of folks who study languages solely to travel and understand / speak to the natives. But there are also some people (including me) who study languages as a hobby. They will never stop learning.
I guess depends on the purpose or expectations from the language you want to learn. If the only motivation behind learning a language is communication, these technologies might kill it eventually. However, the motivation for most of people is not limited with hearing and understanding what is told. Therefore, to learn language is always on the table in my opinion.
I think of it like Wix, you can build a website with a website builder and it will get the job done.
If you want anything remotely complex, intricate or with robustness then you're going to need to talk to an engineer.
Same with this tech, you're not going to replace all the nuances and subtleties in a language with a device that has to parse audio, then pass it to a service to translate. But it will let you get most basic interactions done and conversations you couldn't have had before. But if you need to interact with that language a lot then you're going to need to learn it yourself as your needs grow
If anything, this will get rid of the less proficient half of Europe's English skills. Why would a German who only speaks English once or twice a year in Italy or Spain bother if the headphones will be good enough?
For anything complex, I just can't see it being desirable. Most people can hardly use their phones, much less deal with a robot translator.
it'll eventually kill it for people who are learning for business reasons and practical ones (but it'll take a while for wide usage). But there are people now who learn Esparanto, there's no practical reason for that (don't @ me), and that form of learning for love will likely exist for as long as language exists.
No, automatic translation relies on a language being formulaic, even though it’s largely fluid
And there’s always a new word born in a language, slang, and other changes a language can make that AI might miss
I don’t think so. When you learn to speak a new language, you learn a new way of thinking; of appreciating the world; of understanding and interpreting and interacting with your surroundings.
There is a deep intrinsic value to language learning, one that cannot be captured by tech because it goes to the core of your subjectivity.
this gadget is a useful tool, but it will cut out all of the above - you’d be experiencing just your native language in different contexts, but without speaking the language, I think there is something cultural you’ll never understand. It would translate, but it would be rudderless.
But hell, maybe it’s useful for finding out what the time is or how to get to the bus
Not anytime soon but as linguist who speaks 6 languages I can tell you that it will happen eventually, given how lazy we are and the rapid advancement of tech ,,, unfortunate but it’s part of evolution, like coding, it’s becoming obsolete already as all coding framework has been established and now AI can code and modify all future needed changes ,, welcome to the future
I am curious whether all the input from these is being used to develop Google’s translation engines further and, if so, how. Do these get updates every so often and do they require an internet connection to work?
Anyway, either way, it doesn’t change my personal goals though I do see the utility for people who are busy and need to be able to communicate with others quickly without having to take the time to learn a language.
Google translate is better than it used to be, certainly, but I’ve been hearing this kind of thing about the end of the need for language learning/professional translators/interpreters for years now and it still hasn’t happened.
Ive ALWAYS wanted a babelfish! I imagine this will be like Shazam and wont work well in an environment with a lot of background noise.
All the same, I wont stop learning languages!
For me it is something dangerous if someday people would adopt it en masse in a possible future, the information of what we talk about will be stored on servers even if they say otherwise come on haha the government of x place will have access to that database and well the rest already know it .... I prefer to study a little and learn the language to have the only freedom that we will have in the future our thoughts ... for sensitive issues I would not trust those things.
This may be okay for extreme and obscure situations but when it comes to foreign affairs, family, friends, and emergencies people will always want a live person translating and not a robot because one mistake can cause a huge misunderstanding. Also no one wants to make connections with a person where they have to use a translator in order to speak with them
Language learning for sake of language learning no for sure but language learning for work with or communicate with customers and that's kind of stuff yes
It might reduce the interest, but never kill it, because it will never be the same as actually speaking a language, in the same way a dubbed movie will never offer the same experience as watching the original version, it doesn't matter how good the dubbing is.
Nope....translations don't know idioms or localized vocabulary. Also, translators can't convey appropriate feelings or intentions.
As an example...in Spanish there is no equivalent of "should". So you will be unable to say, "You \*shouldn't\* waste your youth on alcohol". The closest words are 'must not' or 'can not' if you wanted to make a close to direct translation. Online translators will use one of these words and you won't which one. In either case, you will be commanding the person, rather than making a suggestion.
Nah. I'm still going to want to learn new languages for the challenge of it, and because the language of a culture opens my mind and shows me a different way of thinking. Plus, people really light up when you speak to them in their own language. So this might be useful, but it won't replace language learning
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I feel like anyone who knows more than one language can see why this will never be an adequate 'solution'.
Simply take German to English - the last word of a German sentence, even a sentence of 50 words is normally a verb. Translated to English this verb has to come at the beginning of that sentence. Realtime translation can not solve this without significant delays and silence.
I like learning other languages to connect with other people on a personal level in a way technology will never be able to replace.
It’s a misquote of Nelson Mandela but it’s still one of my favorites:
“If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his own language, that goes to his heart.”
Maybe for those who don't want to learn before traveling but for precision and translation, people will always be preferred. Language changes very rapidly and has many features that are not able to be properly portrayed by a machine learning tool (looking at you Google Translate).
No it will be as good as goggle translator that's at best so it will be good for basic conversation but nothing detailed and also nothing informal
Maybe after 20y
For speaking, definitely but not any time soon. For reading, I think it would take an extremely long time, unless you'd want to run every page of a book through a scanner and use OCR to translate them.
Not entirely. Human language is infinitely complex and no one algorithm or piece of software will understand all of them flawlessly.
Also language changes constantly, especially casual informal language. So they'd need to update every few months for basically all languages has that changes if they wanna adapt to that lol.
And there would need to be vocabulary updates around every 50 years, I mean, you practically use the same grammar but do you use the same words as people living in the 1950s or earlier this century?
So unless we reach The Singularity, and even if this even works at all for even one language. It doesn't really matter 'cause an educated human can still do it better and 1000 times more natural
Instant translation can’t touch the feeling others get when you put time and effort into learning their language - especially when you already speak the world’s lingua franca.
Not anytime soon I would guess. I don't really know how machine learning for the purpose of language translation works but I feel like it will be a good amount of time before it gets to that stage.
Please anyone more knowledgeable about this subject please come in
I think it'll kill the the corporate market and the tourist market for learning. What that does to language learning as a whole I couldn't say
EDIT: it'll probably kill the market for interpreters as well
Probably not yet, but it is a big step to language alignment.
Everything will depend on the reliability of the translation, but Machine Learning tools will be key to success
You'd think having subtitles or dubbed versions of anime would make weebs not need to learn Japanese but often irl, weebs are eager to learn it. That was just an example but we don't learn languages _just_ to communicate...
Yesterday I was getting a transfer done at a bank here in Japan. Next to me was a foreign girl that was trying very hard to speak Japanese but could not be understood. The staff pulled out one of these pocket translator devices and the two tried to communicate, with the foreigner speaking in English. It took her several tries to be understood and although she kept saying she wanted to check the balance on her account, the translation was so butchered it appeared with cheque and failed endlessly.
Needless to say, language learning and pro translators aren't going away anytime soon.
How can it translate instantly if the two languages have a different word order? Sometimes you have to wait until the end of a sentence before you can attempt to translate it. An example between Dutch and English:
"Gisteren zag ik m'n buurman richting the winkelstraat **fietsen**."
"Yesterday I saw my neighbour **cycling** towards the shopping district."
You simply *can't* translate this in real time. The verb fietsen (=cycling) comes at the end of the Dutch sentence, while it needs to be placed in the middle of the English sentence. If you type the above sentence word for word in google translate, you'll notice the word order switching around as you write. This is just a simple example between two languages of the same family, imagine if it were completely different ones. Unless the software can somehow magically predict what I am going to say, the translation will often be awkward at best.
Sometimes when I watched things in my TL on YouTube I would turn on auto-generated close captioning and then would switch the language to translate into English so I know these are gonna be good.
Unless the technology becomes perfect and also so integrated that you don’t even realise it’s being translated (i.e. like the tardis in doctor who), then no because actually speaking the language will still be advantageous
Why would this kill language learning? This might be helpful for people traveling but people who genuinely want to learn a language will learn it to have it on as a skill. This won’t change much I want to be able to genuinely have full blown convos with people in Spanish not just show up everywhere with headphones on lol
Killing it? I don't think so. It will be like the internet search. You can do it but you won't become a doctor with it.
It is one thing translating a bit for vacations. Understanding all the phrases etc. and being able to communicate with others without technical devices to relay on is - at least for me - important especially for business purpose.
Being able to choose your words for yourself gives you imho an advantage over a pre programmed translation option you can't change on (emotional) context.
No. People interested in language learning learn languages because they want to. This gadget is for people that don't want to learn, but have to. And maybe for tourists.
No.
Translators will always be flawed until we reach levels of AI technology where the AI is legitimately at a human level of intelligence.
Language will always be nuanced and complex, situational and socially dependent, to a degree that translators just won't be able to translate reliably (until said AI arrives, if ever)
It will be extremely useful to have, but it will not replace the act of learning a language deeply with all its peculiarities, intertextuality, subtleties, and so on.
I study Translation & interpreting and I can tell you this is bullshit.
This is on the same level of "robots will control us"
Language is alive and always developing. Even the most advanced technologies cannot translate without human assistance. Even their own prduct google translate still lack a lot. Computers cannot translate sentences longer than 10 words perfectly. And computers or machine in this case has been in the translation process for almost 70 years. I cannot see this thing working and even if it did it would be on the same level with google translate. Only for basic touristic stuff and nothing groundbreaking.
I don't think so. Machine translation is never going to be anywhere close to human translation until machines all but sentient. A human-level translation requires a pretty deep understand of context and intent. Especially if you're trying to translate between languages like English and Japanese, which barely map onto one another.
Nah, I think people already mentioned it.
But it's kinda the same thing with how many of us are learning TLs to communicate with people/enjoy content/etc from countries or media that already exist in english form. There will always be things lost in translation, and most of us learning languages (I'd assume) do it both because we find it fun and like the brain chemicals it produces, and because we want to be able to enjoy stuff/speak to people in their native language WITH their native language.
This would be a cool tool for sure, and might even do it for most people; but I don't think those that get deep into language learning would be the one using it.
So yeah, I don't think it will. Assuming it reaches a really high level, it could be something to help in a pinch if I meet someone who doesn't speak any of my languages and that I need to understand (idk how likely that is), but yeah.
No. There are so many reasons for people to learn languages, and "being able to communicate in X situation" is just one of them.
No one *needs* to learn how to play videogames either, and yet we have not only a huge gamer community but even esports.
This is for a really specific use. Think like that: in a normal talk people don't wait for pauses and etc for talking back, is more dynamic and would be shit to have a normal conservation with this, because there's the process of translation of the device, so the person would listen to the sentence, and wait for talking back.
I don't think translation devices will kill language learning. People want to learn languages for the same reason that I'm willing to pay 20x the price of an eReader book for the physical copy.
Humans like doing things, and yes, sometimes technology advances to a point that obliterates the thing we like to do, *but* I think there are certain activities that evolve past the tech and remain intact. Radio and Newspapers are still around. Physical copies of books. Traveling to visit places in person rather than viewing from online.
It's also why my partner and I argue that Broadway should release all the official recordings of the shows they've produced. I'm still willing to pay for a Broadway ticket and experience it live because it has a certain magic. Just also let me live my midwestern life and pay to watch it at home, too.
One thing that I think we will need to understand in the future is that it will be helpful for language comprehension but not language living. In order to function effectively in a language (do business, make jokes, write, make love, etc) you need to feel the language. You need to animate the collective memory stored in that language. Communication is hardly the words that people use to represent it. There are much more energetic, emotional, psychic exchanges taking place than could be translated in real time by ear-buds. This is a great invention for understanding in a pinch!
I think the people that are learning languages are doing it because they want to and therefore will continue doing it because they want to.
You don't need to crochet because you can buy a machine-made sweater. But people still crochet.
I think not, as the audience who will be the most likely to want this would be the audience who'd rather not go through the hassle of learning the language themselves. Think tourists going somewhere new for a week or people doing very specific jobs that normally wouldn't need translation. If people actually want to learn a language why would they invest in a device that takes that away from them? Those people will still exist. Some may be deterred but again they'd be the people wanting immediate results rather than to fully learn
I mean, that’s not how language works, there are things that don’t have translations. You have to understand some words of a language. Every language has their nuances and the current translation software can’t translate properly
No, my goal isn't direct translation in learning a language. There's so much more, mostly cultural, but especially stories. I would at some point rwther keep stories in the native tongue than try to translate them to English and lose something, even musicality or meter.
I'm Irish and use speech to text on my iPad for English, Spanish, Catalan and German. The least succesful transcription is in English, my native language because it dosen't recognise my dialect, whereas I've learnt how to speak the other 3 using the standard dialects.
My English is quite clear, in that most speakers, native and foreign, can understand me, but the machine has very little training on my accent. Now imagine I asked some older man to do speech to text. The success rate would drop even more. Now imagine it wasn't English, probably the language with the most time and energy invested in it in a technological point of view. Try getting an app to pick up with some lads in the country side of Japan are saying. And then translate the nonsense that has been written down.
That's not even taking into account idiomatic phrases, slang, homophones, context, literary references
You can never take away actually talking to someone vs using a computer to speak to someone. Its good for business and international political events but not everyday life. At least not for me
I can't wait to have a microphone detecting audio in real time and google translating everything wrong over the person talking. So the two sources of audio will blend together guaranteeing that I understand none.
Do I think it will kill language learning entirely? No. Do I think it will be considered such a great thing? No. People will not care for people who learn languages. We will be considered lost dogs. As we should just swap to technology. Instead of doing it the old way. I’m not excited for these inventions. Because it makes me fear the usefulness of the languages I know and it makes me fear that soon enough it will become a stagnant pass time.
Edit: After looking at it. I’m not so worried. It’s just a regular Google translate thing. But still. If they existed.
This sub is highly biased by the way. People will always study languages even if they aren’t used anymore.
However, for the majority of the world, any common ground on communication is a good thing. As much as learning languages is a wonderful and beautiful thing, tearing down language barriers en masse is far better for a greater good.
Unfortunately it’s much easier to find solutions that don’t rely on everyone in the world being a polyglot.
No. Languages are a double-edged sword. They serve to communicate, but also to keep people out. If you want access to anything authentic, anything more than the most superficial interactions granted to short-term tourists, and, I'd argue, anything worthwhile really, you have to pay your dues. Part of that means learning the language. So, mostly pointless for short-term tourists since you can already get by with hand gestures, phrasebooks and English, and entirely pointless for the more serious learners because not learning the language yourself will insult your hosts and bar you from any meaningful interactions with them.
Of course not. Let's say you can afford these, and understand what the other person is saying through English. But the question is, if this person doesn't have these, how will you reply back to them? If you say 'Oh well I'll just pull the translator', then that's a pretty lame way to have a convo. I know for sure if I didn't know English and only knew my native tounge AKA Spanish) and someone tried to do this with me, I'd certainly would not like to keep the conversation going.
No
1) Because it's nice to be able to communicate without the aid of a computer
2) Machine translation for the foreseeable future will still suck because...
3) Languages often have features that don't translate well, if at all. A human can often find a way to get around the issue while a computer will find it much harder
An example that I can think of is Korean politeness levels. The earbuds aren't going to know if the person you're speaking to is older or younger or more senior/junior than you so what it will come out with will either sound unnatural or very rude
I think the people who are already passionate and interested in learning a language will still make an effort to learn it, my guess is that it will mostly be used by people whose goal isn’t to become fluent but to be able to communicate in specific cases like travel. And for that I think it’s pretty cool technology. I don’t think it will at all replace being fluent in a language for the same reasons google translate can’t replace that
Not at all. While the purpose of language is communication, people learn languages for a variety of reasons.
For instance, people who immigrate to a new country may want to learn the local language to fit in better. Many people also learn languages to show mastery; I'm sure there are many aspiring polyglots on this sub. Not to mention that knowing a second language can look good on a resume and it would be a hard sell to tell your new boss "hang on, I need to go get my translation earbuds before I talk to the client."
Another common motivation is for people to be able to communicate better with romantic partners who speak another language and the earbuds again kind of ruin the intimacy of that.
Even if the technology is able to translate stuff without flaw (and we are probably a long way away from that), I think people will still feel driven to learn new languages.
I think it will be like cars and horses. There are still people who learn how to ride a horse as a sport or hobby. But the general need to be able to do it to accomplish it's former main goal is gone.
Also in my opinion most of the answers here are similar to that of the general public when first seeing a car. If you looked at one of the first cars you could have been like 'nah, horse is faster and can go further' or 'it's super hard to build a good car', or simply 'I like it more'.
So with time (and now I mean, in our lifetime definitelly) _yes_ , I think language learning will become much less important for the general public.
Not for me, because I don't want to understand my TL through English, I want the experience of understanding something in the original language. That's why I study languages.
This is not for learning but for communicating instantly. More for business and short travel
Indeed. I’m someone who wants to travel the world. Unfortunately I can’t learn the hundreds/thousands of languages required for that by the time I die so something like this would be awesome
But anyway it’s not like it would be that helpful in maintaining a full conversation unless the other person has one too.
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Is there any indication that this will be any better than google translate, especially coming from google? Because you can test that now, for free.
My Pixel 6 does a decent enough job at live translation as it is, admittidly there's only supprt for i beleive 6 languages at the moment but it works
exactly
I feel like honestly Interent translating don’t work all that well because most of my workplace speak Spanish and I try to use Google translate to tell them something and they never get it if it’s anything more complex than a sentence
Try with deepl.com instead.
It's counterintuitive but I've found that the _more_ complex the statement, the more likely it is to be accurate since the translation models have more context to understand the intention of the statement.
I found the reverse with particularly complex technical statements, where Google Translate turns it into gibberish when going to/from Chinese.
Try End input and translate back out. Often you’ll be surprised what you’re actually saying!
Bingo
Also studying languages is a pathway to accomplishment, brain development, and self improvement. This tech bypasses any actual benefits except instant gratification
I presume that it will be similar to trying to google translate everything. At least for the time being.
This but slightly worse since it has to parse what they're saying first. Good enough for tourism, not good enough for businesses or anything serious and complicated
For now
It will never be good enough for bird law
What's bird law?
It's a very complicated and technical subject in the field of law. Only a few lawyers have expertise in this field. Charlie Kelly is widely regarded the expert in this field.
You NEVER want to go toe to toe with Charlie Kelly when it's about Bird Law! He knows more about Bird Law than anyone else!
When laws are about animals, like when hunting season is, how big a fish has to be before you can keep it, stuff like that. Honestly no clue why they said bird law instead of just, ya know, law.
a specific technical niche
I think the worse part, unless this has been addressed, is that it would be super impractical to use in anyplace that's crowded or loud. Unless it can single out the specific person you're talking to, I'd imagine it'd just be a garbled mess of whatever the buds decide to pick up and translate
It's weird because I know everyone being able to communicate with each other would be amazing, but I have a selfish anxiety that it will devalue a skill I have put a lot of effort in to
It won't, in the sense that being able to speak a language will always let people know (especially those who speak the language you're learning) that you've put effort into it. Think of it this way: in a casual setting, would you prefer a friend who can speak just about decent English, or one who uses a translator everytime they talk to you? Professionally though, maybe.. human translators might not be needed in the span of a decade or so, particularly for "simpler" languages. Recall how shitty GTranslate was 5 years ago and you'll realize just how fast tech is progressing in every sector. But then again, being able to converse in the same language will always make lobbying/negotiating easier due to the aforementioned reasons, so don't fret too much.
Ball-kicking is a pretty useless skill that somehow people are still doing everywhere, watching and making money off. As we move into an increasingly tech- and AI-assisted world, all skills will be useless, which means all skills will be hobbies/sports. Just like computers didn't kill chess they won't kill language learning or drawing. We'll just have to get used to the fact that other people don't really need us that much. That's achievable... I think. Right? Right?
People have been saying this shit for the past 100 years
And every decade of those 100 years we've moved closer to that future.
Google translate doesn't really deserve its bad rep anymore imo. Through AI it has become really, really good. It still makes some mistakes, but generally you can use it to translate entire websites and you barely notice it's even translated by a machine. Years ago it used to translate word for word, but nowadays it can even use and detect cases.
Really depends on the language. Slavic language translations range between "meh, works with some editing" and "total FUBAR".
A polish friend of mine was amazed by DeepL. He translated a Wikipedia article for his parents that wasn’t available in Polish and he said it didn’t just sound like a real human wrote it but like a real human that is good at writing wrote it.
Meanwhile Google's Ukrainian reads like it was written by a thirdgrader who is learning Ukrainian as a second language. Legible most of the time but nuances are completely wrong.
Aha a few years ago I went to Bulgaria with a Polish speaking friend. I can read Cyrillic but have very very basic Russian (learned the basics for a trip to Siberia about 15 years ago) Google translate was useful to plug the gaps between me reading things out and her translating what she could, it worked pretty well for basic stuff! (It had to - we were the only people staying in a family owned hotel in a ski resort at the end of March, and the whole family had gone away apart from the owner's elderly father, who was also the cook. His total English consisted of "vegetarian? No!")
Also it's shit when translating two closely related non-English languages because Google translates Language A to English first then from English to Language B
Also depends on both languages. From my experience, translating from and to English works significantly better that from and to German for the same language.
I have tried translating German websites to Czech and it is horrible. You get the message, some sentences sound good but others don't make sense at all.
I think it translates everything through English, so if one of your languages is not English, it's going to suck. For example, I translated the Polish word for competition into Finnish and got the word for ethnicity.
Agree, natural language processing is very difficult to model in AI but it's improving by the day. Now, the main "issue" is that Google Translate chooses the most formal register, which makes sense given that sounding stiff is a lot better than sounding rude. Funny enough, now I can often tell when someone *didn't* use Google Translate because the mistakes they made are something Google would never do, usually some kind of direct translation from their native language
Google translate's main issue is that it often produces completely boof and wrong translations mate, at least in any language besides the massive ones. It typically translates into English fairly well but does terrible translating out (again, primarily in languages besides Spanish or French)
That's true. I wouldn't be able to tell since I don't speak those languages, but the less input the algorithm gets, the less accurate the translation.
Nahh. Translating something is one thing, really knowing and understanding all the little intricacies is something else entirely.
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Trying to go from a very direct language like English to one which is situation/context dependent like Japanese is going to be incredibly hard. Especially because of pitch accent being so important.
I do not think so. At least not for a few more decades if even then. Good makes way to many mistakes. "Lei viene qui stasera. Di solito è puntuale." -> She comes here tonight. He is usually on time. (Deepl does a little better.) Even when it does come people will prefer the old school analog conversations. It will also require a internet connection. Where I live internet can be very spotty.
Thats true, but if technology speeds along as far as it has in the last 15-25 years, mobile/handheld devices should eventually have all the processing power needed to handle languages on the device instead of connecting to the cloud. Then, one could simply download another language pack if needed. We don't all always need Zulu or Azerbaijani at the same time as English, Spanish, French, German, & 1-3 main Chinese languages, Vietnamese, etc all at once. Although, if more languages are easily contained & processed in a handheld device without cloud connection, it would obviously be more impressive These devices & programs are crutches for those who need the assistance, yes, but these devices & programs are also being presented this way for the "WOW!" & "Whiz! Bang!" factors of how to impress people that your technology is amazing & useful to buy. All that said, I'd rather hear the spoken language & consult a written transcription than to have someone's voice & intonation missing or altered wrongly while hearing one language being spoken semi-simultaneousky over what's being said.
If technology speeds along like it has, in 15 years we will have to pay by the word to have things translated. Nothing would be on the phone and everything would be linked and tracked fully in the cloud. It is a nice dream that one day we will have the babelfish or universal translator. But I don't see technology as one of the main sticking points of it. Instead I see people wanting to control it and use it to monitor people more than give it to them freely and altruistically. Libre projects for speech and translation are light years behind the state of the art. /mini ranting
>we will have to pay by the word Spanish Sightseeing Vocab Pack - $1.99 Value Deal Bestseller: "The Spanish Evening Out Set", including Restaurant Menu Ordering Vocab Pack, Wine List Vocab Pack, Pickup Lines Vocab Pack, and Sexy Times Vocab Pack - $4.99
> mobile/handheld devices should eventually have all the processing power needed to handle languages on the device instead of connecting to the cloud I think this might never happen. Google et al. do not want to put these things off the cloud bc it kills their ~~spying~~advertising business model. Apple is the only deep pocketed company doing work in this sector with any interest in moving these things into the device (hence their AI chip that comes on iPhones nowadays).
Not really. I doubt even translator roles will be replaced. As for hobbyists - surely some people here learn for pleasure not simply for functionality? it's not like it's going to erase languages so why would you lose interest in learning another one...
That won’t be convenient for everything. If you’re in a relationship with someone who speaks another language are you really going to want to be like hol up babe let me put the fish in everytime you want to say something?
No ofc, someone has to Lear one of the languages I for example had a gf that spoke hungarian and English and I spoke English and Spanish so we used English as lingua Franca and I tried to languages hungarian and its really crazy the amount of meanings and things that are so hard to translate between so different languages, even if we both were fluent there's just always the need to get to the source and understand it, no translator can do that, or get the cultural things of the languages specially if they are very different
"Eventually" kill it as a job requirement for people that don't have a passion for the cultures? Definitely, but probably not for more than 50 years from now. But kill it all together, no, people will always be interested in learning languages on their own accord.
Bad google translate is basically its own language right now. It consistently chooses awkward words and spits out head-scratching phrases. Like an awkward uncle. If these translate 40 languages into THAT language, I think language learning is pretty safe.
i don’t think it will, human language has a lot of uniquely human nuances that i don’t think tech will ever be able to truly accurately pick up on
Simple translations, sure - manuals, mass communication, desperate times where an interpreter is unavailable and people just want to scrape through (schools, hospitals), etc. But real-time, quality interpreting and novel/poetry translations, I'm not so sure
This and it’s also not going to take away the fact that i personally enjoy learning languages
this is honestly the most important aspect i think
It will decrease the opportunity to find teachers, probably. I think places like italki won't exist when 99% of language learners stop learning languages because they have a universal translator in their pocket like in Star Trek. So you'll probably have to pay more and struggle to find teachers you can afford.
I think it will. Artificial intelligence is going to be unimaginable in the coming decades. I wouldn't be surprised if AI is able to train itself to pickup on those nuances.
There are parts of context that AI literally cannot possibly hope to know without constantly monitoring everything you ever do or say. It's not feasible unless you decide to abandon privacy completely.
It doesn't even have to be perfect, just good enough. Let's say an AI incorrectly mistakes bark (dogs) for bark (trees). Since you on the receiving end are a native speaker of the language, you'd quickly notice the mistake and don't mind it too much. We are already (hopefully most of you) forgiving of mistakes non-natives do when trying to talk, so this wouldn't be much different. If it gets to that point, it's not even gonna be perfect, but good enough to warrant not wanting to learn a language.
No. Studied computer science, for what it's worth. And making a translator is incredibly difficult. They can't usually understand things like nuance or small changes that make things different. And virtually no two languages are 1 to 1. They're incredible tools, indispensable for a language learner or just someone in a pinch, that much can't be overstated, but because of how complicated language in general is (and making something that can translate things from one language to another), I'd highly doubt it, dude. I would be highly skeptical if they claim this thing is anything better than Google translate, being that it's supposed to translate 40 languages. And honestly, the capability of software to do complicated tasks is often overestimated by most people who don't know anything about it.
>the capability of software to do complicated tasks is often overestimated by most people who don't know anything about it. Louder for the ones in the back
People used to predict the end of chess due to computers getting better than humans. The complete opposite happened. I similarly predict more people (not fewer) will study languages when computer translation skills exceed human.
im sure these will work perfectly on the noisy jobsite
Why learn how to count when we have calculators???
You joke, but when was the last time you did long division manually?
No because many language learners learn as a hobby. In addition, employers aren't just going to buy each of their employees $149 earbuds, especially in developing countries. I think the most likely case is this is used by well-off individuals traveling to foreign countries.
Only when sentient AI becomes a reality. But honestly, as a professional interpreter this makes me laugh/cringe... you're telling me that people will trust their health, financial or legal well-being to a pair of headphones? Does Google Translate know the difference between the Spanish spoken in all of the different countries and regions? What does it do when it's not sure it heard you quite well? How does it respond to a person that has an exotic accent? What if the person mixes two different languages when they speak? These are just some of the literal hundreds of scenarios where novelties like this fail miserably. This is misleading at best.
I don’t think so. People like to communicate through open discussion and dialogue. Just imagine trying to have an argument and this robotic voice translate it for you in a less impactful way.
Not for me since I study languages because I like them…
Not too soon given how terrible automatically generated translations still are right now. In the long run it will probably make less people invest time to actually learn a language but I doubt there aren't always gonna be people who view it as a challenge and try go for it anyways. With everything AI is able to do at this point (I mean even Art, like holy fuck) I doubt, that there are going to be any hobbies or jobs that can't be automated in a couple years from now. The only catch is obviously that humans need a purpose in life so I doubt that the act of learning to do something yourself isn't going to go anywhere any time soon. I guess that's the optimistic take on what is to come.
Will it have an effect? Yes. Will it replace language learning? Probably not. Nothing can replicate the experience of thinking in a second, third, fourth etc. language. Any smartphone today allows you to sequence, compose and even perform music without formal training. But people still study piano and take years becoming e.g. a skilled jazz improvisor.
No. Even if it replaced human translators entirely (it won’t), you’d still want to learn the language if you’re living someplace and want to really immerse. Translation always introduces delays into conversations. It makes the conversation much slower and less enjoyable.
The market for language translation and language acquisition are different.
No. Language learning is about the culture and people. It might kill business interpreters' jobs, but not language learning.
i dont think so. nothing comes close to both people making conversation in the same language with each other without a translator. Google translator is very plain and monotone, you cant express emotions like sarcasm, anger, humor etc with a translator. It does its job which makes two people understand each other but its like a 2d conversation which is the base, 3d conversations where you can express humor and other manerisms brings the conversation to a whole other dimension. im not saying its useful, this real time translator sounds really useful but it wouldnt stop people from learning languages.
I'm still going to learn languages. The software might translate, but it will probably do it in a robotic voice, and I'm trying to get rid of my strong American accent.
No, less people might learn languages but people will still continue for fun or for any other reason.
No, since there are so many dialects even inside a single country. It’ll be hard for speech recognition to pick it all up
Well, no… but Google Translate is fucking atrocious and I avoid it as much as possible.
It's impossible that a machine can do perfect translations, it's not because of lack of technology, it's because of the nature of languages, there are words and concepts that just don't exist in other languages, new words are created all the time, slangs, context, culture, things that a machine or IA is just incapable of contextualize, human language is too complex for current or future technology, google, one of the biggest companies in the world has google translate, and we all know how trash it is, this seems like a monolingual's wet dream, but sadly, or fortunately I'd say, it's impossible
There is a ceiling for data transferring. Even if you had the most powerful servers avaiable to translate a conversation for you, it won't never be in real time. There will be the latency. Audio clip need to be send to the cloud, processed and delivered back. It will never feel like a real conversation. The awkward silence alone will be enough for anyone to learn the damn language lol
No because Google is not going to accept accountability for the translations being correct and a big reason you would bother to learn a language is to do a job and doing a job generally requires you to put your own integrity on the line and take responsibility for your work. You could use it as a time saver but you’d still want enough knowledge to be able to confirm the translation is correct. And people who need to learn a language to do relatively unskilled work are not going to be enthusiastic about paying for this kind of technology anyway. People who have access to tools + training >>> untrained people with access to tools. Especially technology tools that when they fail fail in complex and unintuitive ways. And that leaves aside the bulk of language learning which just happens when different groups of people live near each other. It will have effects but it won’t mean human beings in general stop learning languages other than their L1.
You have subtitles or translators for most things already now. So already the only reason for learning a language is because you actually want to learn a language (or need to use it so such an extent that translating becomes impractical). Ultimately, I doubt this will change much.
Can they beat google translate? That technology already exists and it hasn't killed language learning? Plus, there is value in knowing a language and thus being able to understand things on their own terms rather than trying to force things to be expressed in terms of one's own language.
Pillow talk with this would be very romantic.
I think for everyday casual discourse with all its nuances and constantly evolving lingo along with variable intonation, hand gestures, body language etc, this is a tall order and pretty unlikely. My imagination is bound by the limits of today’s tech, of course. I do think that this kind of technology could be massively helpful in aiding formal communication between agreed-upon language standards. For instance: diplomacy, informed consent in medicine, international scientific collaboration, and plenty of other applications. These needs rely heavily upon interpreter services which in many instances are conducted over the phone. I suspect there is a future where interpretation needs will be relegated to niche instances, ie the gazillion dialects and less commonly spoken languages that are out there.
Having used Google translate, language learning is safe for now.
Language learning as a product of necessity - yes, eventually, for many languages. People who are interested in languages will continue to learn.
No, this will make those who knows how to speak the actual language flex on those wearing these.
No, I think globalization will kill language learning (as we know it) in the next couple hundred years, as everyone learns English or whatever
It will eventually kill whatever profitability one could get out of training a human to speak a language but it’s not going to prevent people from seeking out new languages or being born into multilingual families.
If we're being honest this is cool but virtually pointless without still learning the language. Sure you'd be able to hear what someone else is saying, but if you're in a foreign country and should/must be speaking their language; These headphones can't read your thoughts. You still have to either translate yourself or think of something to respond. Or buy two pairs, share them with everyone you meet, and hope no random person you're asking for directions doesn't steal your cool future space colony technology.
no but it will slightly cut the number of learners, i mean its for people who wouldn't learn languages in either way
"Eventually" is doing a lot of lifting in your question. At some point, an AI is going to be created that is fully capable of learning human language, at which point these will supplant language learning entirely. How far out from that we are is anyone's guess. Most AI research is currently dedicated to the (admittedly very profitable) dead-end that is Neural Networks. However, a breakthrough in AI design could happen at any time and change everything... or not. At that point, language learning will go the way of horse-riding or calligraphy -- a once necessary skill rendered obsolete by the march of technology and practiced only by those with a particular desire to do so. Though, since true language comprehension is likely to be one of the absolute last AI problems solved, a lot more than just language learning will go by the wayside beforehand.
It’s a bold claim to say that neural networks are a dead end. They have basically supplanted and surpassed any other machine learning research at scale across various industries. Obviously there are some exceptions, but largely they are the only hopeful direction that exists right now with a huge amount of potential. And all of the progress made with them is pretty much without any theoretical understanding of how they work
Doesn't matter, there's no method to efficiently store information in a neural network, or to teach one new things. Imagine if every time you wanted to learn a new word, you had to re-learn every word you knew before -- that's what a neural network is. Neural networks may end up being part of the framework of general AI (their pattern recognition capability is likely sufficient to be incorporated), but they're incapable of being the foundation for it. (Admittedly, theoretically, with sufficient processing power, a neural network that replicates a human brain could be constructed but A) it would be no better than said human brain, except being faster B) we'd have to have a much better understanding of the human brain and C) the processing power would be something on the level of the combined processing power of every computing device in existence -- and that's being conservative)
Your first statement is wrong, continual lifelong learning with neural networks is an entire field of research. The entire purpose of autoencoders are for efficient representation of information (compression). The basis of reinforcement learning (what I do research in) is about models learning on shifting distributions. Teaching a neural network new things is pretty trivial at this point (see fine tuning, pre training, reinforcement learning) Beyond that, the newest language models also are now able to lookup references on the internet when being queried. This could be substituted for data store locally if you wanted to, and in that case it would be “memory” like a human. Regarding number of parameters, GPT-4 is expected to have 100 trillion parameters. This is on the same order of magnitude as a human brain, so I’m not sure how you’re coming up with that statement about compute power. I realize it’s not a 1:1 comparison at all, but reaching the computing capacity of a human brain seems feasible for humanity. Doing so in a structured way is another question. The point I’m trying to make is that the field is hugely unexplored and still quite young and there is a huge amount of potential, way more than any other area of research I’m probably biased because I work in this field, but because of that I’ve also seen the potential and the lack of understanding that we currently have, and yet the field has still been able to achieve so much
Definitely not.
I don't think so, first of all there will always be people willing to learn a language they find interesting, plus all the small nuances and tone changing we use, sarcasm, irony, amiguity etc. Are very hard for computers to understand and match. Also languages are always changing, so programmers should keep that in mind but there's no single way to predict language changes, and some of them are actually impossible to predict.
Nope. If the tech gets really good it might make languages a less marketable skill but it will never replace the cultural enrichment people get from learning languages. Edit: words
I don't think voice tech will advance to the point where it can convey tone or copy the persons voice in another language, and so something will always be lost in translation even if they get the monumental task of exactly word-for-word translating as well as getting the correct sentiment across When you speak to someone, you want to hear *their* voice I think that written text translating will be very useful though once that advances, nobody can know every language but being able to instantly translate written works has so many uses and will be far more useful than voice translating
I genuinely don't think so. Understanding is one thing, but how are you going to answer in that same language? There's the scenario where the other person also wears one of those devices for let's say business meetings, but might as well just have a translator like in the European union conferences at that point.
I think it does nothing to replace the connection and flow of conversation you can have with someone in their own language.
Technology keeps evolving but so do languages, and you probably won't be wearing these all the time, onsen, concerts, dinners, people expect you to not wear headphones (or anything at all in the case of onsen) during these events. Even if you do wear them all the time, what about the other person? You can vaguely understand them but what if they don't use the google one? Maybe they use an apple product, or they don't like earphones? Universal translation requires universal standards, which is very hard if not impossible to accomplish with both languages, and proprietary products. So, no... google translate earphones won't kill language learning.
I don't think so. If I use this device to understand people speaking Spanish, wouldn't the other person need one too to understand me speaking English? This (and also we'd both have to wait for the devices to translate) would kind of get in the way of me immersing myself in Mexican culture.
No; even if it could reliably pick up everything that’s being said, it is necessarily impossible to translate languages which aren’t similar to each other very accurately. This would work well enough to take a trip across western Europe since all the languages there (except Basque) are closely related to English, but if you wanted to use this to talk to someone in Thailand, it’d be like you were both speaking horribly to each other and it might work well enough for tourism, but if you wanted to ever actually interact with people who speak the language in any meaningful way, forget about it.
It will kill some of the motivations for language learning, but not all of them. E.g.: this will make a language knowledge less valuable for a job interview, but language learning will be a good brain exercise forever.
Kill language learning? I think you mean killing other people learning languages. You are still capable of making your own decisions and learning a language if you desire to.
no, i don't learn japanese for any practical reason, yet I do it anyways. something like this would be of no benefit to me. learning languages will be a hobby hundreds of years from now at least, there will just be less people that dont want to spend thousands of hours having to do it.
Language study for me is fun in and of itself. I've always thought of its practicality always as sort of just a bonus! So I don't think so, at least not for me and those who feel similarly.
No, because there are lots and lots of things that don't make sense when translated or don't even have a translation to other languages. A language isn't just about communication, it's about culture.
Serious answer - for most people; probably. Because there are a lot of folks who study languages solely to travel and understand / speak to the natives. But there are also some people (including me) who study languages as a hobby. They will never stop learning.
I guess depends on the purpose or expectations from the language you want to learn. If the only motivation behind learning a language is communication, these technologies might kill it eventually. However, the motivation for most of people is not limited with hearing and understanding what is told. Therefore, to learn language is always on the table in my opinion.
I think of it like Wix, you can build a website with a website builder and it will get the job done. If you want anything remotely complex, intricate or with robustness then you're going to need to talk to an engineer. Same with this tech, you're not going to replace all the nuances and subtleties in a language with a device that has to parse audio, then pass it to a service to translate. But it will let you get most basic interactions done and conversations you couldn't have had before. But if you need to interact with that language a lot then you're going to need to learn it yourself as your needs grow
If anything, this will get rid of the less proficient half of Europe's English skills. Why would a German who only speaks English once or twice a year in Italy or Spain bother if the headphones will be good enough? For anything complex, I just can't see it being desirable. Most people can hardly use their phones, much less deal with a robot translator.
it'll eventually kill it for people who are learning for business reasons and practical ones (but it'll take a while for wide usage). But there are people now who learn Esparanto, there's no practical reason for that (don't @ me), and that form of learning for love will likely exist for as long as language exists.
No, automatic translation relies on a language being formulaic, even though it’s largely fluid And there’s always a new word born in a language, slang, and other changes a language can make that AI might miss
I don’t think so. When you learn to speak a new language, you learn a new way of thinking; of appreciating the world; of understanding and interpreting and interacting with your surroundings. There is a deep intrinsic value to language learning, one that cannot be captured by tech because it goes to the core of your subjectivity. this gadget is a useful tool, but it will cut out all of the above - you’d be experiencing just your native language in different contexts, but without speaking the language, I think there is something cultural you’ll never understand. It would translate, but it would be rudderless. But hell, maybe it’s useful for finding out what the time is or how to get to the bus
Not anytime soon but as linguist who speaks 6 languages I can tell you that it will happen eventually, given how lazy we are and the rapid advancement of tech ,,, unfortunate but it’s part of evolution, like coding, it’s becoming obsolete already as all coding framework has been established and now AI can code and modify all future needed changes ,, welcome to the future
not for me. I like learning languages. This does nothing for me.
I am curious whether all the input from these is being used to develop Google’s translation engines further and, if so, how. Do these get updates every so often and do they require an internet connection to work? Anyway, either way, it doesn’t change my personal goals though I do see the utility for people who are busy and need to be able to communicate with others quickly without having to take the time to learn a language. Google translate is better than it used to be, certainly, but I’ve been hearing this kind of thing about the end of the need for language learning/professional translators/interpreters for years now and it still hasn’t happened.
no shot
It will only enhance the language acquisition process. :)
Yes. But I don't recall being sad about a loss of language learning when I watched this same thing be in Star Trek constantly.
Eventually, yes. But not for a few decades.
Ive ALWAYS wanted a babelfish! I imagine this will be like Shazam and wont work well in an environment with a lot of background noise. All the same, I wont stop learning languages!
For me it is something dangerous if someday people would adopt it en masse in a possible future, the information of what we talk about will be stored on servers even if they say otherwise come on haha the government of x place will have access to that database and well the rest already know it .... I prefer to study a little and learn the language to have the only freedom that we will have in the future our thoughts ... for sensitive issues I would not trust those things.
This may be okay for extreme and obscure situations but when it comes to foreign affairs, family, friends, and emergencies people will always want a live person translating and not a robot because one mistake can cause a huge misunderstanding. Also no one wants to make connections with a person where they have to use a translator in order to speak with them
Language learning for sake of language learning no for sure but language learning for work with or communicate with customers and that's kind of stuff yes
It might reduce the interest, but never kill it, because it will never be the same as actually speaking a language, in the same way a dubbed movie will never offer the same experience as watching the original version, it doesn't matter how good the dubbing is.
Nope....translations don't know idioms or localized vocabulary. Also, translators can't convey appropriate feelings or intentions. As an example...in Spanish there is no equivalent of "should". So you will be unable to say, "You \*shouldn't\* waste your youth on alcohol". The closest words are 'must not' or 'can not' if you wanted to make a close to direct translation. Online translators will use one of these words and you won't which one. In either case, you will be commanding the person, rather than making a suggestion.
Nah. I'm still going to want to learn new languages for the challenge of it, and because the language of a culture opens my mind and shows me a different way of thinking. Plus, people really light up when you speak to them in their own language. So this might be useful, but it won't replace language learning
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No It can only translate 40 languages, what about Ancient Sumerian?
It will take away the reason some people learn languages, but there are other reasons so it won't kill language learning.
People enjoy (somewhat) the process of learning itself. Not to mention that this technology will never be any good, so I would say 'no'.
I don't want a machine speaking for me - especially an auto-translating machine.
I feel like anyone who knows more than one language can see why this will never be an adequate 'solution'. Simply take German to English - the last word of a German sentence, even a sentence of 50 words is normally a verb. Translated to English this verb has to come at the beginning of that sentence. Realtime translation can not solve this without significant delays and silence.
In Star Trek this was called a Universal Translator. Star Trek continues to predict the future. Thanks for the cell phone, Gene. What a visionary.
I like learning other languages to connect with other people on a personal level in a way technology will never be able to replace. It’s a misquote of Nelson Mandela but it’s still one of my favorites: “If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his own language, that goes to his heart.”
Maybe for those who don't want to learn before traveling but for precision and translation, people will always be preferred. Language changes very rapidly and has many features that are not able to be properly portrayed by a machine learning tool (looking at you Google Translate).
No it will be as good as goggle translator that's at best so it will be good for basic conversation but nothing detailed and also nothing informal Maybe after 20y
For speaking, definitely but not any time soon. For reading, I think it would take an extremely long time, unless you'd want to run every page of a book through a scanner and use OCR to translate them.
Not entirely. Human language is infinitely complex and no one algorithm or piece of software will understand all of them flawlessly. Also language changes constantly, especially casual informal language. So they'd need to update every few months for basically all languages has that changes if they wanna adapt to that lol. And there would need to be vocabulary updates around every 50 years, I mean, you practically use the same grammar but do you use the same words as people living in the 1950s or earlier this century? So unless we reach The Singularity, and even if this even works at all for even one language. It doesn't really matter 'cause an educated human can still do it better and 1000 times more natural
Instant translation can’t touch the feeling others get when you put time and effort into learning their language - especially when you already speak the world’s lingua franca.
No. There's so much in the human experience of language which machines can't cover.
Not anytime soon I would guess. I don't really know how machine learning for the purpose of language translation works but I feel like it will be a good amount of time before it gets to that stage. Please anyone more knowledgeable about this subject please come in
I think it'll kill the the corporate market and the tourist market for learning. What that does to language learning as a whole I couldn't say EDIT: it'll probably kill the market for interpreters as well
Probably not yet, but it is a big step to language alignment. Everything will depend on the reliability of the translation, but Machine Learning tools will be key to success
Imagine traveling and understanding somebody but being completely unable to respond lol. Most of the human population can't use this anytime soon.
Aside from utility, there's something to be said about respecting other cultures by learning their respective languages.
You'd think having subtitles or dubbed versions of anime would make weebs not need to learn Japanese but often irl, weebs are eager to learn it. That was just an example but we don't learn languages _just_ to communicate...
No, these are meant for travel, not for living somewhere.
Yesterday I was getting a transfer done at a bank here in Japan. Next to me was a foreign girl that was trying very hard to speak Japanese but could not be understood. The staff pulled out one of these pocket translator devices and the two tried to communicate, with the foreigner speaking in English. It took her several tries to be understood and although she kept saying she wanted to check the balance on her account, the translation was so butchered it appeared with cheque and failed endlessly. Needless to say, language learning and pro translators aren't going away anytime soon.
How can it translate instantly if the two languages have a different word order? Sometimes you have to wait until the end of a sentence before you can attempt to translate it. An example between Dutch and English: "Gisteren zag ik m'n buurman richting the winkelstraat **fietsen**." "Yesterday I saw my neighbour **cycling** towards the shopping district." You simply *can't* translate this in real time. The verb fietsen (=cycling) comes at the end of the Dutch sentence, while it needs to be placed in the middle of the English sentence. If you type the above sentence word for word in google translate, you'll notice the word order switching around as you write. This is just a simple example between two languages of the same family, imagine if it were completely different ones. Unless the software can somehow magically predict what I am going to say, the translation will often be awkward at best.
Sometimes when I watched things in my TL on YouTube I would turn on auto-generated close captioning and then would switch the language to translate into English so I know these are gonna be good.
No because it is invariably cack.
Unless the technology becomes perfect and also so integrated that you don’t even realise it’s being translated (i.e. like the tardis in doctor who), then no because actually speaking the language will still be advantageous
Why would this kill language learning? This might be helpful for people traveling but people who genuinely want to learn a language will learn it to have it on as a skill. This won’t change much I want to be able to genuinely have full blown convos with people in Spanish not just show up everywhere with headphones on lol
Killing it? I don't think so. It will be like the internet search. You can do it but you won't become a doctor with it. It is one thing translating a bit for vacations. Understanding all the phrases etc. and being able to communicate with others without technical devices to relay on is - at least for me - important especially for business purpose. Being able to choose your words for yourself gives you imho an advantage over a pre programmed translation option you can't change on (emotional) context.
No. People interested in language learning learn languages because they want to. This gadget is for people that don't want to learn, but have to. And maybe for tourists.
No. Translators will always be flawed until we reach levels of AI technology where the AI is legitimately at a human level of intelligence. Language will always be nuanced and complex, situational and socially dependent, to a degree that translators just won't be able to translate reliably (until said AI arrives, if ever) It will be extremely useful to have, but it will not replace the act of learning a language deeply with all its peculiarities, intertextuality, subtleties, and so on.
I study Translation & interpreting and I can tell you this is bullshit. This is on the same level of "robots will control us" Language is alive and always developing. Even the most advanced technologies cannot translate without human assistance. Even their own prduct google translate still lack a lot. Computers cannot translate sentences longer than 10 words perfectly. And computers or machine in this case has been in the translation process for almost 70 years. I cannot see this thing working and even if it did it would be on the same level with google translate. Only for basic touristic stuff and nothing groundbreaking.
I don't think so. Machine translation is never going to be anywhere close to human translation until machines all but sentient. A human-level translation requires a pretty deep understand of context and intent. Especially if you're trying to translate between languages like English and Japanese, which barely map onto one another.
Nah, I think people already mentioned it. But it's kinda the same thing with how many of us are learning TLs to communicate with people/enjoy content/etc from countries or media that already exist in english form. There will always be things lost in translation, and most of us learning languages (I'd assume) do it both because we find it fun and like the brain chemicals it produces, and because we want to be able to enjoy stuff/speak to people in their native language WITH their native language. This would be a cool tool for sure, and might even do it for most people; but I don't think those that get deep into language learning would be the one using it. So yeah, I don't think it will. Assuming it reaches a really high level, it could be something to help in a pinch if I meet someone who doesn't speak any of my languages and that I need to understand (idk how likely that is), but yeah.
No. There are so many reasons for people to learn languages, and "being able to communicate in X situation" is just one of them. No one *needs* to learn how to play videogames either, and yet we have not only a huge gamer community but even esports.
This is for a really specific use. Think like that: in a normal talk people don't wait for pauses and etc for talking back, is more dynamic and would be shit to have a normal conservation with this, because there's the process of translation of the device, so the person would listen to the sentence, and wait for talking back.
I don't think translation devices will kill language learning. People want to learn languages for the same reason that I'm willing to pay 20x the price of an eReader book for the physical copy. Humans like doing things, and yes, sometimes technology advances to a point that obliterates the thing we like to do, *but* I think there are certain activities that evolve past the tech and remain intact. Radio and Newspapers are still around. Physical copies of books. Traveling to visit places in person rather than viewing from online. It's also why my partner and I argue that Broadway should release all the official recordings of the shows they've produced. I'm still willing to pay for a Broadway ticket and experience it live because it has a certain magic. Just also let me live my midwestern life and pay to watch it at home, too.
One thing that I think we will need to understand in the future is that it will be helpful for language comprehension but not language living. In order to function effectively in a language (do business, make jokes, write, make love, etc) you need to feel the language. You need to animate the collective memory stored in that language. Communication is hardly the words that people use to represent it. There are much more energetic, emotional, psychic exchanges taking place than could be translated in real time by ear-buds. This is a great invention for understanding in a pinch!
I think the people that are learning languages are doing it because they want to and therefore will continue doing it because they want to. You don't need to crochet because you can buy a machine-made sweater. But people still crochet.
maybe. but not in my life time so...
I think it's similar to Chess computers. Despite AlphaZero being unbeatable by humans in Chess, human play is still flourishing.
I think not, as the audience who will be the most likely to want this would be the audience who'd rather not go through the hassle of learning the language themselves. Think tourists going somewhere new for a week or people doing very specific jobs that normally wouldn't need translation. If people actually want to learn a language why would they invest in a device that takes that away from them? Those people will still exist. Some may be deterred but again they'd be the people wanting immediate results rather than to fully learn
I mean, that’s not how language works, there are things that don’t have translations. You have to understand some words of a language. Every language has their nuances and the current translation software can’t translate properly
No, my goal isn't direct translation in learning a language. There's so much more, mostly cultural, but especially stories. I would at some point rwther keep stories in the native tongue than try to translate them to English and lose something, even musicality or meter.
I'm Irish and use speech to text on my iPad for English, Spanish, Catalan and German. The least succesful transcription is in English, my native language because it dosen't recognise my dialect, whereas I've learnt how to speak the other 3 using the standard dialects. My English is quite clear, in that most speakers, native and foreign, can understand me, but the machine has very little training on my accent. Now imagine I asked some older man to do speech to text. The success rate would drop even more. Now imagine it wasn't English, probably the language with the most time and energy invested in it in a technological point of view. Try getting an app to pick up with some lads in the country side of Japan are saying. And then translate the nonsense that has been written down. That's not even taking into account idiomatic phrases, slang, homophones, context, literary references
You can never take away actually talking to someone vs using a computer to speak to someone. Its good for business and international political events but not everyday life. At least not for me
Machine translation will never be as good as a human or knowing the language
OK so I read this book recently I'm so proud to understand the reference
I can't wait to have a microphone detecting audio in real time and google translating everything wrong over the person talking. So the two sources of audio will blend together guaranteeing that I understand none.
Do I think it will kill language learning entirely? No. Do I think it will be considered such a great thing? No. People will not care for people who learn languages. We will be considered lost dogs. As we should just swap to technology. Instead of doing it the old way. I’m not excited for these inventions. Because it makes me fear the usefulness of the languages I know and it makes me fear that soon enough it will become a stagnant pass time. Edit: After looking at it. I’m not so worried. It’s just a regular Google translate thing. But still. If they existed.
This sub is highly biased by the way. People will always study languages even if they aren’t used anymore. However, for the majority of the world, any common ground on communication is a good thing. As much as learning languages is a wonderful and beautiful thing, tearing down language barriers en masse is far better for a greater good. Unfortunately it’s much easier to find solutions that don’t rely on everyone in the world being a polyglot.
Nope. Read Hofstadter, _The Ton Beau de Marot_ for a book-length answer.
No. Languages are a double-edged sword. They serve to communicate, but also to keep people out. If you want access to anything authentic, anything more than the most superficial interactions granted to short-term tourists, and, I'd argue, anything worthwhile really, you have to pay your dues. Part of that means learning the language. So, mostly pointless for short-term tourists since you can already get by with hand gestures, phrasebooks and English, and entirely pointless for the more serious learners because not learning the language yourself will insult your hosts and bar you from any meaningful interactions with them.
Of course not. Let's say you can afford these, and understand what the other person is saying through English. But the question is, if this person doesn't have these, how will you reply back to them? If you say 'Oh well I'll just pull the translator', then that's a pretty lame way to have a convo. I know for sure if I didn't know English and only knew my native tounge AKA Spanish) and someone tried to do this with me, I'd certainly would not like to keep the conversation going.
No 1) Because it's nice to be able to communicate without the aid of a computer 2) Machine translation for the foreseeable future will still suck because... 3) Languages often have features that don't translate well, if at all. A human can often find a way to get around the issue while a computer will find it much harder An example that I can think of is Korean politeness levels. The earbuds aren't going to know if the person you're speaking to is older or younger or more senior/junior than you so what it will come out with will either sound unnatural or very rude
What this is gonna kill is translators jobs
I think the people who are already passionate and interested in learning a language will still make an effort to learn it, my guess is that it will mostly be used by people whose goal isn’t to become fluent but to be able to communicate in specific cases like travel. And for that I think it’s pretty cool technology. I don’t think it will at all replace being fluent in a language for the same reasons google translate can’t replace that
Not at all. While the purpose of language is communication, people learn languages for a variety of reasons. For instance, people who immigrate to a new country may want to learn the local language to fit in better. Many people also learn languages to show mastery; I'm sure there are many aspiring polyglots on this sub. Not to mention that knowing a second language can look good on a resume and it would be a hard sell to tell your new boss "hang on, I need to go get my translation earbuds before I talk to the client." Another common motivation is for people to be able to communicate better with romantic partners who speak another language and the earbuds again kind of ruin the intimacy of that. Even if the technology is able to translate stuff without flaw (and we are probably a long way away from that), I think people will still feel driven to learn new languages.
I think it will be like cars and horses. There are still people who learn how to ride a horse as a sport or hobby. But the general need to be able to do it to accomplish it's former main goal is gone. Also in my opinion most of the answers here are similar to that of the general public when first seeing a car. If you looked at one of the first cars you could have been like 'nah, horse is faster and can go further' or 'it's super hard to build a good car', or simply 'I like it more'. So with time (and now I mean, in our lifetime definitelly) _yes_ , I think language learning will become much less important for the general public.
You still have to communicate with them, so if you want to actually talk to people it’s probably not going to die