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Applications for translation today in every smartphone. So why waste time and energy on learning English when you just need to open an online translator and let technology do the rest? Experts from the Skysmart online school explain why we are still far from a world without language barriers.
Machine translation is not perfect
The human brain is far more flexible and subtle than any computer. We easily perform tasks that are beyond the power of technology. For example, we can recognize the face of our friend in a fraction of a second, even if he puts on glasses, sticks a fake beard on himself, or draws the logo of a football club on his forehead.
But the computer in such a situation will be confused. The same applies to systems that recognize speech. Technologies already now make it possible to more or less tolerably translate the distinct speech of a person and even the dialogue of two people – but only if they speak strictly in turn and in complete silence. If the conversation takes place in a noisy room, where music plays and people chat in the background, artificial intelligence gives up. He doesn’t know if Taylor Swift singing on the radio is a participant in the conversation, and he can’t tell your voice from the voice of the person on the phone on the other side of the room.
An equally difficult test for the machine is a lively and emotional conversation in which the interlocutors laugh, whistle, cough and interrupt each other. All these natural sounds are perceived by the digital translator as interference, and the quality of the translation is noticeably reduced. But people in this situation do not experience any difficulties and do not think that “ha-ha-ha” is an unfamiliar word that needs to be translated.
Both interlocutors should speak in a neutral and clear manner.
“Go straight ahead and you will see this house near McDonald’s” – machine translation can easily cope with such a phrase. But people do not always speak the correct literary language. A person may well say something like “Hey, shove in a straight line to the McDachka, and there you will run into this hut.”
A translator has not yet been developed that could translate speech overloaded with slang, abbreviations, colloquial expressions and wordplay.
Another big difficulty for an online translator is stuttering or other problems with diction. And even if you try to speak in such a way that the machine understands you exactly, there is no guarantee that your interlocutor will be just as diligent.
Online translator may not be available
We are used to relying on technology and often forget that it can also fail. Perhaps you have an accurate and convenient online translator on your phone. It works well and you start believing that you don’t need to learn English at all.
But imagine that during a trip abroad you lose your phone or the battery runs out at the most inopportune moment, the signal disappears. In such a situation, without knowing the language, you will not even be able to buy a new smartphone and a suitable SIM card.
But what about in institutions where the use of telephones is prohibited – for example, in some offices, embassies and consulates, bank branches? What to do where there is no Internet, for example, in the cabin of an airplane or at a distant mountain camp site?
Not everywhere this way of communication is appropriate.
An online translator will really help you communicate with a waiter in a restaurant or a taxi driver. You may even be able to maintain a very primitive dialogue with a new acquaintance in a nightclub. But vacation is not the only situation where a foreign language may be required.
Without a good knowledge of English, you will not be accepted to a foreign university and will not be hired by an international company. And just being friends with a person through a smartphone is somehow strange. You can get acquainted in this way, but deeper relationships still require direct communication.
Enjoying a book in the original, a Broadway theater production or a festival movie with the help of an online translator will not work either – for all these situations you need good English.
The computer does not know the context
“How many times did you have an organ transplant while you were flying to Russia?” – such a question was asked by a Muscovite to a dumbfounded Canadian in the very first minutes of their acquaintance. More precisely, this is how the application translated her question. In fact, the girl was interested in the number of transfers at the airport. But the online translator did not know which of the meanings of the word “transplant” was meant. After all, it can be translated into English as transplantation (organ transplant), layover (transfer at the airport) or potting (plant transplant).
We define the context without effort, but machine translation does not yet know how. And this is fraught with a lot of embarrassment and awkward situations.