Today’s language translation apps are comparable to self-driving cars: highly useful, promising, on the verge of maturity, and predominantly driven by machines. The existence of this technology is truly remarkable.
Despite their utility, machine translation can still be awkward or clunky at times. As an example, I recently had a conversation with my neighbor Andre, who immigrated from Russia last year and speaks minimal English. He relies heavily on Google Translate to navigate his way through the American Dream, despite occasional breakdowns in communication.
Companies like Google, Apple, and Microsoft are working towards eliminating the language barrier with smarter technology, although developers acknowledge that faster neural machine learning is needed for significant progress. Nevertheless, many consumers are often surprised by the capabilities of today’s translation apps.
In fact, some are unaware of the advancements made in translation technology, such as live speech-to-speech translations demonstrated in a seven-year-old video by Microsoft Researchers. The awareness of these developments has not kept pace with the technology itself.
Personally, I was unaware of the sophistication of Google Translate, Apple Translate, Microsoft Translator, and Amazon Alexa until I began researching the topic following my encounter with Andre. While these apps may not provide instant translations akin to human translators, their turn-based speech-to-speech, text-to-speech, or photo-to-text translations are incredibly powerful and continue to improve over time.
Google credits the development of its Neural Machine in 2016 for substantial improvements in accuracy when translating entire sentences compared to just phrases. However, some apps may still struggle with basic translations, as observed when converting simple greetings like “Olá, tudo bem?” from Portuguese to English.
Overall, while there is still room for improvement, the advancements in language translation technology are impressive and hold the promise of bridging communication gaps in the future.
