Education

Future of learning languages

Why your smartphone will NEVER be a universal translator

– Benny Lewis

The (translation) app essentially works by translating word for word what it sees. Some people may feel that it’s ‘good enough’ when they are monolingual and don’t understand how languages work. I was a professional translator for several years and I can tell you that even for very basic sentences, translating word for word produces nothing but gibberish in far too many cases – even more so for languages further away from English than Spanish would be.

There are too many situations where a word has several translations. Did you know that ‘set’ in English has 464 meanings in the Oxford English dictionary, depending on the context? And ‘run’ has 396? You can’t just pick one, even if it comes up as a likely translation a third of the time.

‘Lo’ in Spanish, so overused in the video, technically can mean ‘it’, but it actually is way more likely going to mean ‘that which is’, ‘what’, ‘him’, ‘you’, and actually in the vast majority of cases it isn’t translated or requires serious rephrasing in the English equivalent sentence. No dictionary can portray this efficiently; only by real use do you finally understand what ‘lo’ can mean.

There are some cases where you can indeed ‘get the gist’, but it requires one hell of a good imagination, especially when the word order is totally off and basic words with many translations are misused.

Reproduced by permission of Fluent in 3 months
copyright (c) 2011, Fluent in 3 months, Why your smartphone will NEVER be a universal translator

Our perspective

Not really a great news for all of us! There is no getting away from English language command in India. Smartphones are not going to be anywhere close to enable deep conversations across languages.

Worse, things get dramatically different when we are talking about students. A translator cannot invent words by itself, for instance, erythropoietin, abioseston, phenomenology, flush (as used in design), eponymous, regression analysis, hedge funds are just some words, which will not be found in most Indian languages. In such cases, how does a native speaker ever communicate a word that would translate into another language? Thus, translators could work for communicative languages in routine social settings but not for business, technology, finance, economics and many other specialised and technical fields.

Don’t be surprised that there is no word for Internet in most Indian languages and we use the word ‘Internet’ itself in Indian languages. In India, we have an additional dimension to handle – our academic transactions in higher education and specialised domains such as medicine, engineering, psychology, economics, finance, design, fashion, chemistry, etc. can only be conducted in a ‘foreign language’ called English.

The complexity of translation can be understood by briefly understanding the way the lead transaltors work as of date (and in a near future). They present some translations and let users correct it and use the same for the next users – there is really little ‘technology ‘in language translation as yet.

Thus, the future of learning language does not really change for students and for doing business, research and professional work in general. Of course, learning a language for communicative purpose is getting easy. For those interested in learning English for professional and higher education, the old way still holds for the foreseeable future. Read , Write, Listen and Speak.

Gazing through the crystal ball

  1. Master a language, ideally the language of academics/business – it’s the most important life-long learning capability
  2. Reading competence is the critical essential in building academic-level competence in the language of reading
  3. India has a special challenge – the aspired language of academics and business is a ‘foreign tongue’ i.e. English! Thus, we have to help our children master a second tongue as the first tongue of academics and business. Developing English language competence should be the only real academic goal till primary school years and it must be largely mastered.
  4. There is no short-cut to language learning for children because the language of academics is not just for communicative purpose. The language is the means of logic and reasoning too and that requires the highest level of language competence – academic level.

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