While workers worldwide ponder how artificial intelligence might affect their livelihoods, there’s one sector where that question is no longer hypothetical. Machine translation has reduced the amount of work available to human translators and interpreters, and depressed their earnings.
I do, but more importantly there are translation earbuds and stuff, and people can also just use their phone with paired wireless earbuds. Sometimes people already move to another country and don’t really bother learning the language because they can sort of get by. I imagine the number of people who do that would increase if they can just rely on their phone or earbuds to accurately translate everything for them (more so with a phone and paired earbuds since it can then both listen and speak for you).
Also, I imagine a number of people learn English and largely just use it to read or listen to stuff on the internet. If they can just automatically translate it without issues like missing phrases and other errors, then they might not learn it, which could in turn harm e.g. their employment prospects if they move abroad. This could apply to other languages too, but English is basically the default language on the internet so it’s an obvious example.
When I started reading British books in their original language, instead of the professional translations, they got about 10× funnier. And that’s despite only having B1-B2 reading comprehension. Translations can never capture all of the connotations of a word or phrase.
Your point about learning English might very well be true though. There is a high correlation amongst EU countries, between the average English level of adult citizens, and whether or not popular movies get dubbed or only get subtitles.
YouTube introduced that horrible mandatory auto-dubbing recently. At some point, that might become viable, and that will probably severely impact language acquisition.
Maschine Translation only really works for written text. I don’t know anyone who wanted to learn a language to read written text
I do, but more importantly there are translation earbuds and stuff, and people can also just use their phone with paired wireless earbuds. Sometimes people already move to another country and don’t really bother learning the language because they can sort of get by. I imagine the number of people who do that would increase if they can just rely on their phone or earbuds to accurately translate everything for them (more so with a phone and paired earbuds since it can then both listen and speak for you).
Also, I imagine a number of people learn English and largely just use it to read or listen to stuff on the internet. If they can just automatically translate it without issues like missing phrases and other errors, then they might not learn it, which could in turn harm e.g. their employment prospects if they move abroad. This could apply to other languages too, but English is basically the default language on the internet so it’s an obvious example.
They are missing out.
When I started reading British books in their original language, instead of the professional translations, they got about 10× funnier. And that’s despite only having B1-B2 reading comprehension. Translations can never capture all of the connotations of a word or phrase.
Your point about learning English might very well be true though. There is a high correlation amongst EU countries, between the average English level of adult citizens, and whether or not popular movies get dubbed or only get subtitles.
YouTube introduced that horrible mandatory auto-dubbing recently. At some point, that might become viable, and that will probably severely impact language acquisition.