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Learning foreign languages: Will it become obsolete | ||
Tags: Foreign Languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Kazuki Newbie Portugal Joined 4215 days ago 1 posts - 2 votes | Message 1 of 42 12 May 2013 at 11:30pm | IP Logged | ||
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Hello everyone
I´m Portuguese and i speak a little bit of several languages. I´d love to follow this path of learning many languages, but only if i can take any kind of professional adavantage out of it. The problem is that, with the advance of technology, i´m really afraid that in a near future the hability of speaking several languages will most likely become useless in terms of finding a job. The translation devices might become so advanced that knowing multiple languages will probably lose it´s appeal in the work market. What´s your opinion on this subject? Would it be a bad decision to invest in a degree related to foreign languages? 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5010 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes  Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 2 of 42 12 May 2013 at 11:48pm | IP Logged | ||
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The translation devices will never take the place in my opinion. Yes, they will be a
very useful tool but they won't ever correctly translate with all the respect towards grammar, precise choice of words (especially when you are translating a word which has a homonyme which is something totally different in the other language), no respect towards style and some intricacies of syntax, conjugations, cultural relevance (like idioms), context and so on. So, I wouldn't worry. Even the relatively simple conjugation issue is still unsolved. There will always be place for foreign languages in the job market during our lifetimes (unless we all are forced to English). And even if you had such a miraculous app in your phone and could translate anything with 99% accuracy. Do you think it would be better than direct communication? But the language degree is a different issue. In my opinion, it is useless, unless you want to do a job that directly requires that particular piece of paper. Studying something other and "more useful" (like engineering, chemistry etc.) with a language on side is a valid option. You can get an internationally valid certificate in the languge instead. 7 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 5131 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 3 of 42 13 May 2013 at 12:13am | IP Logged | ||
There are a few careers with languages that'll probably not ever be relegated to machines, at least not in my lifetime. One is legal document translation. Another is legal interpretation. Both these careers tend to need vetted professionals that have the ability to not only accurately translate and/or interpret, but to swear under oath that what they translate and/or interpret is accurate. Surely you have an idea of what it is you'd like to do professionally with languages, no? Speaking several languages isn't enough these days to get ahead (has it really ever been?) Specialization is where it's at. R. == 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5533 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 4 of 42 13 May 2013 at 6:29am | IP Logged | ||
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I have an amateur's knowledge of statistical natural language processing, which is the academic field providing many of the theories that make Google Translate work. Google Translate does one thing very well: it finds statistical correspondences between languages, and exploits those to provide rough translations.
But Google Translate is both dumb and ignorant. Ignorant, in the sense that it knows absolutely nothing about the world except those statistical correspondences between words and phrases, and nothing about objects, or physics, or human behavior. Dumb, in the sense that it can't even pretend to think—it applies one trick like an idiot savant, and it can't do anything else at all. In the end, a machine which is both dumb and ignorant is always going to be at a disadvantage. The machine doesn't understand the world, and it doesn't understand people, and it's inevitably going to botch stuff. For a human analogy, imagine that you're assigned to translate during some business negotiations, but that you're only B2 in both languages, you know nothing about the culture, and you don't understand the industry in question. In a situation like that, you're going to be a lousy translator. And that's pretty much the situation that Google Translate confronts every day. Now imagine translation software that could handle that meeting. It would know both languages extremely well. It would express itself eloquently. It would understand the cultures and the industry. It would have common sense about people, and basic physics, and the world around it. That software could certainly translate acceptably well. But if you could build software like that, you could also build software to replace the businesspeople in the room, too. Any software which can replace a top-notch human translator can replace a human, full stop. And if that future arrives, we won't be asking "How will translators make a living?" We'll be asking, "How can we convince that machines that humans make adorable pets and that we should be allowed to live in a pleasant habitat?" Also, if you want to work in another country, I just can't imagine trying to use Google Translate during a job interview or a conversation with your colleagues. That seems like a Monty Python sketch waiting to happen. 15 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4534 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 5 of 42 13 May 2013 at 8:22am | IP Logged | ||
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I learned to touch-type about twenty years ago. I remember at the time being worried that automatic speech-to-text programs were going to become dominant and waste all my precious effort. ;)
I think it depends how well you want to learn to speak. Google translate is already at about B1 for some languages, and for others perhaps A2. I am not sure how fast it will get to C1 in most, if any languages, but let's say it does get to C1 within the next 5-10 years in the language of your choice, if you start studying now you could be a solid C2 by then, which is definitely a lot better/more functional than C1. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5010 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 6 of 42 13 May 2013 at 8:58am | IP Logged | ||
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well, for languages similar to English, it might be A2/B1 even though I think the CEFR
scale is completely useless for a machine. The machine doesn't start from introducing itself and doesn't make its way towards more complex topics But the thing is totally useless when it comes to more different languages. Translations into Czech are only understandable if you know English, in which case there is no reason to use the thing. The other way arounf might be better but not that much. In next five to ten years, google translate might be quite good for closely related languages. So you "wouldn't need" to learn for example French or Spanish or Swedish (not sure about that one) as a native English speaker. But the rest of the languages will still be there, waiting for you, unconquered by the machine in my opinion. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4534 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 7 of 42 13 May 2013 at 10:13am | IP Logged | ||
On the one hand I am reminded of a story an MIT professor who gave his student the task of solving the 'minor' problem of machine vision over one summer in the 1960s. On the other hand, I am also reminded for the Astronomer Royal who said sometime in the 1960s that people would never reach the Moon. It's hard to predict how fast these things will go, but I think it's probably a safe bet to say that machine language translation is (at least) some years away, in which case there is absolutely no reason to use possible advances in machine translation as an excuse not to learn a language. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Paco Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 4278 days ago 145 posts - 251 votes Speaks: Cantonese* | Message 8 of 42 13 May 2013 at 10:18am | IP Logged | ||
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First, I must make myself clear that I do not learn a language for the sake of career;
it will be a delicious dessert, but only after the main course. In regard to studying a degree, I guarantee you will be out of the company if all your motivation is based upon a sort of not-yet-exist real professional need. If you want something beneficial to your career - go study mathematics and philosophy! In fact, you learn a language much faster by studying auto-didactically, and you will not need a language degree to prove you know a language well. Unless you would like to study a master or PhD (which is not likely), a language degree is unnecessary (even if you will study further it is sometimes not necessary). On the impact of translation devices on career, well, I do not think they are relevant at all. I might concur if, somehow, someday, those devices could translate even idioms to absolute accuracy, and get the masterpieces in Sanskrit translated into Classical Chinese without any loss (or addition) of referential and cultural elements, and, MOST IMPORTANTLY, can translate what I speak immediately and make it as if I am speaking a foreign language to others, when I only know my native tongue. (But even so, it only means there would no longer be boundary in general communication, but I am afraid "understanding" cannot be achieved, culturally, literarily, and, people-to-people, man-to-man. Well, I might be wrong. Who knows? The world has transformed, like a blaze that takes my breath. And there it comes; the metamorphosis, too strong another genesis...) Edited by Paco on 14 May 2013 at 7:51pm 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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