The Tower Rebuilt
Real-time translation ends a barrier as old as speech.
Within this decade, high-quality simultaneous translation will be a feature of every earpiece and every video call. The consequences reach further than tourism: diplomacy, migration, education, and love all get cheaper across languages.
Small languages, saved and endangered
Translation models can preserve endangered languages by making them useful again. They can also accelerate their decline if speakers stop bothering to teach children a tongue the machine already handles.
The cultural nuance problem
Translation is not just word-for-word. Humour, deference, honorifics, and taboos travel badly. Models get better at this every year but will remain imperfect for a long time.
A shared internet, at last
For the first time, a Brazilian teenager and a Vietnamese teenager can genuinely converse. The social consequences of that — for movements, romance, science, propaganda — are hard to overstate.
Questions worth arguing about
- ◆Will English still dominate the internet in 2040?
- ◆Should schools still teach foreign languages?
- ◆Who is responsible when a translation causes harm?