“[By 1985], machines [computers] will be capable of doing any work Man can do.”
Herbert A. Simon, of Carnegie Mellon University, one of the founders of the field of artificial intelligence – speaking in 1965
He wasn’t quite right with his timing, but I have to agree with his prediction if we move it forward a few years. But why won’t there be any language schools in the future? Because computers are becoming more powerful daily and this progress is unlikely to stop…ever.
From the fictitious Encyclopaedia Galactica – from Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: “The Babel fish is small, yellow and leechlike, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish.”
Last year I wrote an article for ETp and in it said: “The history of machine translation by computer began with a 1954 experiment in which sixty Russian sentences were translated into English at the Georgetown University in the USA. Though widely and enthusiastically reported in the press, such is the complexity of language that the journalists’ enthusiasm proved to be little more than premature extrapolation.”
Google Translator Toolkit can currently translate 345 languages between 10,664 language pairs.
Dragon Naturally Speaking types my work for me on my computer as I speak with 99% accuracy. Text Aloud reads it back to me with astonishing clarity and excellent pronunciation. Accurate speech-to-text and text-to-speech are already here. We even have to speak to machines on the telephone – and they speak back, too.
Translingual Information Detection, Extraction and Summarization (TIDES) was being developed by military departments before 2002. This project is the development of “advanced language processing technology to enable English speakers to find and interpret critical information in multiple languages without requiring knowledge of those languages.”Speech-to-speech translation in the form of an electronic Babel fish might seem a long way off, but may not be so. We would not want to make predictions like that made by Dennis Gabor, British physicist and author of Inventing the Future, in 1962 when he predicted: “Transmission of documents via telephone wires is possible in principle, but the apparatus required is so expensive that it will never become a practical proposition.” Since then the fax has come and almost gone, superseded by email and other electronic data transfer systems.
Remember the advent of the digital calculator? I do. I had one of the first programmable ones way back in 1976. I wrote a BASIC program for it with which I could play a Lunar Lander game. Back in 1976 I could buy something in a shop for 9.65, hand over 10.65 and be given the 1.00 in change without the shop assistant so much as stopping for breath. Try that today in Carrefour, Sainsbury, Tesco or whatever shop you have near to you. Better still, hand over the 10.00 and wait until the shop assistant has punched it into the till, and then offer the 65 pence, cents or whatever. Watch the panic form on their face as they desperately try to figure out what they are supposed to do. The till is telling them to give you 0.35 change from your 10.00 note. Even with a calculator to hand they will struggle to work it out. There is no longer any way to get rid of the loose change in your purse.
The electronic calculator removed the need to do simple mental arithmetic and thus spelt the end of humanity’s ability to do simple mental arithmetic.
My prediction in this post is that Google Translate, Babylon, and other such language tools will eventually become so sophisticated that they will have the same effect as the pocket calculator – they will remove the need to have the skill of speaking another language.
They may not be capable of speech-to-speech translation yet, nor may be able for some time, but this group is concerned with the question of private language schools of the future. In the future, dear reader, I can promise you that accurate speech-to-speech translation in real-time will be a reality.
The danger for the language school of the not-too-distant future lies close at hand. I regularly read Russian, Chinese, Arabic web pages translated very accurately, as far as I can tell, into English. I often communicate with my online students by email in English, but sometimes provide a Google translation into the student’s own language where necessary for clarity. Keep the sentences simple and Google does a wonderful job.
Just as the world stopped wasting time learning to do mental arithmetic after 1976, might it not also stop wasting time learning a foreign language when any document, or spoken word, can be quickly and accurately translated by machine?
How wonderful a Babel fish device inserted into my ear and connected to my iPhone, or whatever electronic wizardry might happen to be in my pocket, such as by bluetooth, would be if it could automatically translate the spoken word from Spanish to English and vice-versa! This is the future, have no doubt. Would I waste my time learning Spanish or any other language with this resource at my disposal? Absolutely not!
So, I’m afraid that there won’t be any language schools to look at in the future, private or otherwise, and the TEFL industry had better start looking for a new cash cow to milk.
Posted under Teaching, Technology
