Whether it’s a Duolingo lesson or an encounter with Google Translate, there’s no doubt technology has changed the way we learn languages. John McWhorter, resident linguist at the New York Times, recognizing this trend, praises the serviceable way that AI is offering translations across hundreds of language combinations.
McWhorter rightly asks the question – what about spoken language?
The rise of instant speech translator apps has been a big boost to learning languages. I’ve been using foreign language dictionaries on my phone for the past decade, and all of these have a speech component. This is great for the pronunciation of words and phrases, but it’s a far cry from a conversational tool. Language learners have to seek out situations to use these expressions in the appropriate contexts. This language learner has sometimes landed on her face trying it. I remind myself that we learn from our mistakes, especially those of the embarrassing variety.
Having said that, speech translator and dictionary apps have come a long way in recent years thanks to corpus linguistics digitally collecting and tagging words and their collocates from natural language. AI adds a layer to this, predicting text strings based on usage. But as I found in my experiments with AI for writing, where academia and eloquence take a back seat, algorithms generate a strange spoken language clearly influenced by social media content. For example, to help me with colloquialism in spoken Italian and French, I’ve started using DuoCards, a flashcard app that also gives sample sentences. Apparently butin in French is slang for buttocks, roughly translated by the AI driven app as booty. Remember Shake Your Booty from the 70s? It’s had a resurgence as a popular meme. I’m left wondering if butin is dated slang in French. I think I’ll stick with the anatomically correct fesses if someone’s backside gets into a conversation.
McWhorter gives his verdict on using AI translators for spoken language: ‘I don’t think these tools will ever render learning foreign languages completely obsolete. Real conversation in the flowing nuances of casual speech cannot be rendered by a program, at least not in a way that would convey full humanity.’
As someone with four language partners on the go, I agree wholeheartedly. To this I add that blogs with their informal registers are also full of these nuances of speech, and that includes made up language. I’ve used the word digiverse in my title. You won’t find it in dictionaries, and Word has annoyingly underlined it in red. But it is a completely usable portmanteau word. I know you know what I mean. Will a bot ever communicate like this?
Paola Trimarco 