Comments on: Will technology make language rights obsolete?

By: Why teachers turn to AI – Language on the Move

Why teachers turn to AI – Language on the Move — Wed, 08 Jan 2025 20:44:00 +0000

[…] you liked this episode, check out more resources on technology and language: Will technology make language rights obsolete?; the podcast Tech Won’t Save Us; and Are language technologies counterproductive to […]

By: Action Chair Dave Sayers: “LITHME brings together many people to share interesting new ideas – many of whom would never meet otherwise” – LITHME

Thu, 15 Jun 2023 10:49:36 +0000

[…] of intelligent devices and services became widespread. I tried to gather my thoughts into a little essay, which was published the following year. That gradually turned into a conversation with others in […]

By: Ka Ho Lawrence HO

Ka Ho Lawrence HO — Wed, 08 Nov 2017 21:34:00 +0000

Dear Professor Piller and fellow classmates,

After reading this post, I did a mini online research on how technology influences English teaching. I found several journal articles which include some interesting findings. Kukulska-hulme (2009) believe that mobile technology takes learning out of the classroom, which is often beyond the reach of teachers. However, when we are facing this innovation, it is significant to define what should be best learnt under a classroom setting, what should be learnt outside classroom, and ways in which relations between these settings have to formulate. Liu, Wong & Tai (2016) suggest digital storytelling activities possess a positive influence towards students’ English learning. Juffs & Friedline (2014) recommend a way to incorporate English learning with technology is that both computer scientists and teachers cooperate together to design more interactive learning activities for online learners and to remind students the correct ways to use these tools efficiently.
Just some thoughts,

Lawrence

References
Juffs, A. & Friedline, B. E. (2014). Sociocultural influences on the use of a web-based tool for learning English vocabulary. System, 42, 48-59.
Kukulska-hulme, A. (2009) Will mobile learning change language learning? ReCALL, 21(2), 157-165.
Liu, C., Wang, P. & Tai, S. (2016). An analysis of student engagement patterns in language learning facilitated by Web 2.0 technologies. ReCALL: the Journal of EUROCALL, 28(2), 104-122.

By: Min Wu KIM

Min Wu KIM — Sun, 05 Nov 2017 13:09:00 +0000

Will technologies take over languages? Many people, even the ordinary, have thought that it will a decade ago. At that moment, as a student who studied English and teaching English, I hopefully thought it would not be possible because the translating programs at that time, did not keep up with my expectation, a lot of errors and different nuance. However, with the help of artificial intelligence developed dramatically and the speed of the innovation accelerated for the last 10 years, I think the technology-based translation business is about to blossom. I roughly assume that the advance of technology will occupy many practical parts of the linguistic areas in the near future. However, it does not mean that the jobs related to languages will perish. There will still be areas where the electronic devices can not cover, for instances, emotions conveyed with languages and the linguistic tactics that human has developed for ages such as sarcasm and irony. So, in such cases as a meeting that a speaker needs to appeal, a study of history, and arts, there will always be a need for the language communicated by human beings, no matter how highly developed the technologies will be.

By: Dhanisa Kamila

Dhanisa Kamila — Thu, 12 Oct 2017 14:46:00 +0000

This is such a fascinating article. The future is certainly here and many people are already enjoying it whether they realized it or not. As one of those people, I can tell that I really cannot escape from this consistently growing technology. I’ve been using mobile translations for many years, for work and study purpose, and I have to admit that such technology is actually just getting better and better. It sure is getting more reliable as many more researches and studies are being conducted for the sake of this technology. However, the socioeconomic inequality in our world here is sadly still providing the high possibilities of not making language rights obsolete, despite of our ever-growing technologies.

By: vy ha

vy ha — Mon, 25 Sep 2017 10:36:00 +0000

This article is certainly very fascinating, especially in this day and age when technology invades every aspects of our lives. All the information about AI and the improvement of auto translation reminds of an article I’ve read not too long ago about Facebook killing its own AI for inventing its own language http://www.pcgamer.com/facebook-kills-ai-that-invented-its-own-language-because-english-was-slow/ which reminds us that all the things we see in sci-fi is becoming a reality. The future of us all understanding each other’s language with the help of technology seems possible. However, if it becomes a reality, I think it would do us more harm than good as we might lose human interaction and our deep affection to one another. The beauty of language being spoken by a human being with his heart and mind being opened to learning about another culture, a new way of life can easily be lost.

By: DIEU PHUONG THAO NGO

DIEU PHUONG THAO NGO — Wed, 06 Sep 2017 16:59:00 +0000

With all the recent advances in Artificial Intelligence and machine learning, mechanical translation will surely improve over time. However, in my opinion, human translation will forever remain the asymptote of the machine translation learning curve: it keeps on approaching yet never reaches.
This reminds me of the Turing test, proposed by Alan Turing in the 1950s: to determine whether a machine’s behavior is equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, human behavior, a human judge will converse with both the machine and another human through 2 disparate text-based interfaces; if the judge cannot determine precisely which is which, the machine passed the test. And so far, it seems that none is nearly capable of fooling a human judge yet. A machine can translate the “Italian restaurant” sign, but it will not translate Dante’s Inferno into something remotely resembling the spirits of human poetry.

By: Yeongju Lee

Yeongju Lee — Mon, 21 Aug 2017 07:20:00 +0000

Thanks for sharing an interesting topic 🙂

My bachelor is English translation and interpretaion and I learned how to naturally translate and interpret source language into target language between Korean and English based on the grammatical order of each language. While I was learning, I sometimes used google translator when I struggled with translating some words or expressions; however, it actually didn’t help me since each language has different grammarical order and different expressions depending on the certain contexts. That is why translation or interpretation is not just changing one word into another word, but it should be completed by considering various aspects such as cultures and settings. Also, it was hard to translate some certain words if the target language doesn’t have thosewords. For example, the colours of Korean words into English words; there are so many different words that describe the colour of yellow in Korean, but in English, we usually just say yellow or more plentifully, dark yellow and light yellow. That is why, I described the colours rather than only using the word, yellow; however, I am wondering whether the translating machines can consider these aspects. If they can, it means that the machines acquire ability that only human beings were able to, which is somehow sad.

By: Brendan Kavanagh

Brendan Kavanagh — Wed, 16 Aug 2017 04:17:00 +0000

I love the possibility of minority language speakers connecting with the rest of the world through the power of technology. I do have two thoughts about this, which I relate to my experience working with Indigenous languages in Central Australia.

The first is about the limits of translation. Eastern Arrernte has a broad vocabulary relating to land and culture, but it would take a great deal of creativity to translate an English conversation about filing a tax return. In this case, the concepts shared between the two languages would be miniscule.

There is also another ethical question about cultural appropriation, especially where the translation software is commercially owned. Many Indigenous language speakers consider themselves as the custodians of their language. An example is Wikipedia’s controversial use of the Tasmanian palawa kani language.

See the article in the link below.
https://www.languagetrainers.com/blog/2014/08/18/can-you-own-a-language/

By: ALEXANDROS BINOS

ALEXANDROS BINOS — Thu, 10 Aug 2017 03:54:00 +0000

An interesting article about the future of machine translators. It appears quite science fiction and i am not totally convinced that technology will ever be able to translate precisely. More importantly though, machine translation raises ethical questions regarding the extent that we humans really desire our intercultural relations to be conveyed through machines and robots. The achievements of human civilization are based on human communications (languages) and mental cognitions through thoughts,senses and life experiences. If machine translators ever acquire the capabilities to interpret and translate these, it will be the saddest day for all humanity.

By: Philipp Angermeyer

Philipp Angermeyer — Tue, 25 Apr 2017 19:16:00 +0000

You note that advances in machine translation depend on the size of the underlying database of parallel corpora (“The more data that goes in, the more accurate it becomes”). That fact in itself introduces inequalities, because the size of the database will vary greatly by language. The more speakers a language has and the more texts have been written and translated, the larger (and “better”) the database. So, we can expect machine translation to improve for language pairs with large amounts of available data, like, say English and Spanish. But what about languages with small numbers of speakers? Languages that are not official languages? Languages that do not have a standardized writing system, whose speakers have low rates of literacy? Even if machine translation is capable of producing acceptable results for Spanish-English translation, it will do nothing for speakers of indigenous languages of Mexico, for example. Many such languages will never even be included in Google Translate’s menu (which currently has 103 languages). But even among the languages that are included, there is huge variation in the size of the database. And always will be as there simply will never be as many parallel texts in English and Corsican, or English and Kyrgyz, as there are in English and French, or English and Chinese). One problem is that people will judge machine translation by its performance with well-known language pairs, and will then assume that it is equally suitable for all other languages.