真有意思。I see a lot of dismissals of the projections in this article. Thirty years ago, just as I was working for several years as a Chinese-English interpreter, I would have agreed with all those dismissals. I no longer agree. As some of the subcomments here have pointed out, all that automated translation and interpretation have to do is become less expensive than either a) learning the relevant language yourself or b) hiring good-quality human translators and interpreters. Automated translation and interpretation is already well along that path.

A crucial skill for a professional interpreter or a casual language-learner is "lexicalization," figuring out what the correct match is between what is possibly a phrase in one language but only a single morpheme that is part of a larger word in another language. But the huge advantage automated translation solutions have is shared learning and long-lasting memory. If the lexicalization is built into a database, for example a database kept by Apple, Google, IBM, or some other multinational provider of translation services, that learned information can be deployed in products over and over and over again. In the end, that's all that it takes for automated translation and interpretation to do better at equal cost (or as well at less cost) compared to human language-learning or human language services. I got out of interpreting for a living years ago, because I finally came around to the understanding of how little I could compete with the worldwide efforts made with new technology to tackle language problems. I still think learning natural modern human languages is a very intellectually enriching activity, and all my children do that, but we expect to live in a world a decade from now with very good real-time interpreting and translation systems for a wide variety of language pairings.