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Comment by lettergram | Hacker News Reader

The better translation technology is the less likely it is I’ll ever learn a language.

To put it another way, in 10 years when I visit China I could probably have an in-depth conversation without ever knowing Chinese.

I’d the Chinese can come to a university and never need to learn English, they won’t. Your parents and community will teach out to speak and that’ll be the end of it.

It’ll be closer to the Tower of Babel scenario. Every community will have their own language and dialect and the AI will just adapt. If a solar flare takes out electronics we won’t be able to understand each other.

Alternatively, the AI will teach us to speak or an implant will teach us similar to the matrix.

Those are the scenarios in the next 25-30 years I see.

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> 10 years when I visit China I could probably have an in-depth conversation without ever knowing Chinese

Doubt it. When you learn a language you learn a lot more than the translation, you learn thinking and connotations that require a broader understanding that never get captured regardless of the translation quality, because they require knowing history and seeing previous uses in context that can't be captured in the translation.

"Good" translation will do for language what wikipedia has done for knowledge. Everyone will get a superficial understanding, some will pretend that reading off a definitions is the same as actually knowing something, and the world will get a lot more shallow, empty conversations.

All of that does not matter for just communicating, even for the languages where google translate is terrible, it's already equivalent to a B2 level which is enough for communicating about everything.

In some languages, DeepL has near perfect translation to the point you cannot really tell if it was translated.

The Tower of Babel scenario isn't so bad is it? Instead of minority language speakers being under immense pressure to adapt to and be replaced by dominant languages, communities can continue to exist as they are in their own language.

> To put it another way, in 10 years when I visit China I could probably have an in-depth conversation without ever knowing Chinese.

preposterous. having an indepth discussion with a foreigner requires not only the language but also the understanding of the cultural context.

I don’t need cultural context to order a cheese burger. Presumably, future AI systems would be able to translate this context as well. They do to some extent [poorly] today.

You moved the goalpost from "in-depth conversation" to "order a cheese burger".

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