What if you could understand other languages? Would you still want to learn them and most importantly would we even need a Lingua Franca?

For those who watched “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (HGTTG)” Babel Fish might be familiar. When Babel Fish is put into ear, one can understand any language. Can this “Babel Fish” phenomenon be possible through Technology?

Technology has already started to change the world as we know it. Why not languages?

To give an example, we think we are speaking the same language with computers just because they have interface in human languages. But machines use binary code (0-1) to communicate one another and us. Just because we see the interface does not mean we speak the same language.

I made a search on internet on “reasons to learn a foreign language” and the most common ones are; study and research, travel, studying abroad, career, culture and communication. Babel fish enables you to do all these without needing to learn a language. Is it Science Fiction? Not really.

If you think that’s a “fly idea” you probably have not seen what Google can do. To give you a perfect example, Google owns Youtube.com and we watch videos on Youtube everyday either directly or indirectly through sites like Facebook. I am sure you have realised “Captions” menu by now and liked it. Captions can be created by you or Auto-captions, which uses “Voice Recognition” technology, can be activated. It recognizes what people say and transcribes it and when you choose Translation language it will be translated instantly.

Chrome (Google again) browser asks you whether you want to translate pages into another language. Who does all the translation? GoogleTranslate is the best translation tool for now but unfortunately not good enough for complicated sentences. It scans many Human translated documents online and match the Cyber Translator translation with Human translations, then come up with best possible result. To be fascinated, watch the Google Translate video below and please check out Captions and Translation menus.

Babel Fish example of today can be the smart phones. Install an application like Google Translate and speak, it will recognise your speech and translate within seconds. It is available in Android and IOS platforms. The next Lingua Franca seems to be the Binary Code. Please install Google Translate and see for yourself.

By reading the information above you might you might think the world of languages is going to an end. On the contrary, I believe that:

• Technology is in its advanced primitive evolution now. Voice Recognition is not good enough to distinguish speech from noise so it recognizes speech 90 % correctly if only speech is slow and clear enough without background noise. And although translation softwares have improved over the last decade, it is only natural at elementary level translations and sometimes not even them. As the artificial intelligence technology improves and the number of online sources increase, translations will improve.
• European Union is giving away funds for protection of rare spoken languages. This technology may decrease the level of interlanguage interaction and word replacement level or reinforce people to speak rare languages more in the future and accordingly help them survive.
• I personally don’t think this technology will be effective within next two decades and the use will also take some time to be absorbed by people but who knows, we are already living in Science Fiction when compared to 50 years ago.

What will happen to language teachers then? Industrial Revolution?
Handcraft; less but more valuable…

 

Special thanks to Mauricio Escobar for the friendly chat and endurance.