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After Babel Fish: The promise of cheap translations at the speed of the Web
More communication is not necessarily better communication.
The Belgian traveler who can’t read an apparently urgent Hindi sign, the Korean scientist writing an article in her third language, the Peruvian parent whose baby monitor comes with Chinese directions, the Saudi business owner arguing with a Norwegian contractor—all these parties, and many others, will find the new and improved MT a godsend. In the first place, you don’t need to wade very deeply into the technical literature to grasp that, while the new MT has surpassed the old benchmarks by Olympic leaps and bounds, the machines are far from the “super polyglots” that Mr. Pedro has been peddling for smooth sailing in the metaverse. At our cultural moment in which a single ill-timed word or misplaced character can ignite a career-ending social-media storm, I suspect that some hard lessons await the most vociferous early adopters, especially those who pay no heed to Bellos’s warning against straying into languages in which you can’t spot rubbish (or excrement).
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