AI could make it less necessary to learn foreign languages
rise of English has made that less necessary. But most people—at least seven of the world’s eight billion—still do not speak English. That leaves options like pantomime, a willingness to be surprised by what arrives at dinner—or, increasingly, technology.
More and more people are using simple, free tools, not only to decode text but also to speak. With these apps’ conversation mode, you talk into a phone and a spoken translation is heard moments later; the app can also listen for another language and produce a translation in yours. You may still get a surprise or two.
Google Translate may be the best-known name in machine translation, but it often blunders. Take “my wife is gluten-free," the kind of thing you might say at a restaurant abroad. In French or Italian, Google Translate renders this as “my wife is without gluten"—true to the words rather than the meaning.
DeepL, a rival, does better, offering various options, most of them along the correct lines. The best tool may not be a translation app at all. Though not marketed for the purpose, ChatGPT, a generative AI system that churns out prose according to users’ prompts, is multilingual.
Rather than entering an exact text to translate, users can tell ChatGPT to “write a message in Spanish to a waiter that my wife and I would like the tasting menu, but that she is gluten-free, so we would like substitutions for anything that has gluten." And out pops a perfect paragraph, including the way Spanish-speakers actually say “my wife is gluten-free": mi esposa es celíaca. It is a paraphrase rather than a translation, more like having a native-speaking dinner companion than an automated interpreter. Travel has long been a motivator for study—unless people start to feel AI
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