Every time I stepped into a taxi, the driver usually didn’t understand where I wanted to go. I lived on Wanhangdu road (万航渡路) in the Changning District of Shanghai, and always had the hardest time pronouncing the street name correctly. Chinese is a tonal language, which means that the way you pronounce a word can dramatically alter its meaning.
For example, xīfú (西服) is pronounced flat on the i and rising on the u, whereas xífu (媳妇) is pronounced rising on the i. This really matters, because xīfú means suit while xífu means wife. One slip of the tongue and you’ll say “Your wife looks nice” instead of “Your suit looks nice.”
My street name happened to have several tones I had to get exactly right. If I pronounced a phoneme flat when it should have been rising, the taxi driver wouldn’t understand. Especially because I was trying to pronounce a street name; the driver didn’t have any other context to understand me.
So I tried a few times, and when that didn’t work, I showed him my apartment’s location on Google Maps, which I really should have just done from the start because that always did the trick. Technology made the language barrier irrelevant.
A Decade of Technological Progress
That was late 2013. Today, a decade of technological progress later, I could have a conversation with the driver if I wanted. I’d use the Google Translate app to repeat in Chinese whatever I say in English, and vice versa for the taxi driver, and we could have a reasonable back-and-forth doing so.
I’ve tried this in Georgia (the country) and it almost completely removes the language barrier. We understand each other. I can have something that approximates a conversation. And that’s from English to Georgian and back. It works even better for more popular language combinations.
That’s just the start. Have a look at this:
Not only does HeyGen translate the man’s English into near-perfect French and German, but it also changes the movement of his lips to accommodate the language. It’s close to the point where it’s hard to figure out what the original language is.
And it doesn’t just work for linguistically similar languages. A friend tried HeyGen from English to Turkish, and it was essentially perfect Turkish too (as judged by my wife, who speaks it fluently). Sadly, I tried myself from English into Mandarin, and that translation wasn’t quite good enough yet.
But that’s not the point.
Another Decade of Technological Progress
This is new technology that will get a lot better. Currently, HeyGen still takes a few minutes to process and translate your video. But it’s not hard to imagine a future where someone says something in a language you don’t speak, and through your headphones you immediately hear it in a language you understand. A real-time Babel fish1. A universal translator.
Consider how useful this will be. You can go on a trip and speak to a local without any language barriers. You can talk to people you’d otherwise never talk to because they don’t speak the lingua franca. And have you ever been the only foreigner in a group of native speakers, forcing the group to speak the lingua franca when they’d rather speak in their mother tongue? I’ve certainly been in that situation.
All problems of the past with a universal translator.
But there is a cost. Why ever learn another language if you can understand everyone through technology? Students will tell their French language teacher that they’ll never need to use French in real life, because they’ll just rely on technology, and they’d have a point too.
But that’s a genuine loss. I speak multiple languages and consider myself somewhat of a linguist, and the benefits of learning a foreign language extend far beyond being able to communicate with someone. First, learning another language is a workout for the brain. It improves your memory, your attention, and even how much gray matter your brain has.
Second, by learning another language, you learn about a culture. It’s easier to understand why people act and think a certain way when you put significant effort into learning their language. These aren’t insights that technology will present you on a golden platter. They are insights that can only be acquired through hard linguistic work.
Third, learning another language is a process of self-transformation. Those who speak multiple languages will attest that you become a different person in a different language. I am different in English than I am in Dutch than I am in Italian. I like my English self the best, which is why it’s my main language.
So while I’m strongly in favor of a universal translator, I also believe everyone should learn at least one other language. It may be harder for teachers to explain why students should put in the hard work, but the benefits cannot and should not be ignored.
All this said, I hope to one day return to Shanghai, step into a taxi, and have a conversation with the driver in fluent English that he’ll understand in fluent Mandarin. We’ll talk about our families, our countries, and how incredible it is that we can talk to each other.
Douglas Adams came up with the Babel fish when he wrote The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It’s a small, yellow fish you place into your ear that will then translate any language you hear. The Babel fish is said to have caused more wars than anything else in the history of creation, because it removed all barriers of communication.
Technology is definitely super helpful in closing the gaps of language barriers, but the reliance on technology doesn't help one to learn and become good at a language. The reason why I can speak three languages is because of this brain work I had to exercise while learning them (yes, even including my mother tongue, Russian, which worsened when I immigrated to Canada as a child lol). Why I lost German and Spanish is because I no longer practiced them. Thank you for this thoughtful essay, Thomas!