[lg policy] Any thoughts on language policy in a world of instant automated translation?

[Dave Sayers]

It can't be long now. In many ways the technology is already in place. For example 
Skype Translator offers automated speech-to-speech translation and is pretty good 
according to the user reviews I've seen, e.g. https://youtu.be/dPYgexVJ0jQ, 
https://youtu.be/3Vi4s4KsyPk?t=2m30s.

The Google Translate app has similar functionality, e.g. https://youtu.be/nHUizVXnUSo.

At this point, these services still seem to need fairly careful, non-overlapping 
speech, they're not entirely accurate even with that level of easy input, and they're 
only available for particular languages. But there are media reports (perhaps a 
little breathless) about the rapid pace of innovation in automated translation, based 
on deep learning and AI, e.g. https://goo.gl/Nr9SWE, https://goo.gl/pkKJ7f.

 From the pace of change it seems reasonable to assume that in the next ten years 
we'll be in a position where you can have reasonably fluent conversations using this 
kind of technology.

How many languages are included remains an open question, but in principle it seems 
this could change a lot of the foundations of contemporary language policy.

Among the goals of language policy I think are two broad overarching ones: to secure 
the rights of minority language speakers to be understood, and to promote minority 
languages as a valuable source of diversity. Automated translation doesn't really do 
anything to the second of these two arguments, but it has the potential to address 
the first almost entirely - of course with a whole raft of assumptions about 
accessibility of technology and translation of enough languages.

What do we think, lgpolicy folk?

Dave

--
Dr. Dave Sayers, ORCID no. 0000-0003-1124-7132
Senior Lecturer, Dept Humanities, Sheffield Hallam University | www.shu.ac.uk
Honorary Research Fellow, Cardiff University & WISERD | www.wiserd.ac.uk
dave.sayers at cantab.net | http://shu.academia.edu/DaveSayers



---
This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software.
https://www.avast.com/antivirus
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/lgpolicy-list/attachments/20170302/4a10b9eb/attachment.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
_______________________________________________
This message came to you by way of the lgpolicy-list mailing list
lgpolicy-list at groups.sas.upenn.edu
To manage your subscription unsubscribe, or arrange digest format: https://groups.sas.upenn.edu/mailman/listinfo/lgpolicy-list