Take this and Word Lens like capability -- if I was in junior high, I'd make the argument that there's no need for me to learn a foreign language. In a few years, I can speak and write any language there is!
This might save you some time/money, but it certainly can't bridge the gap between different languages. Keep in mind that "to translate is to betray" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traduttore,_traditore
Doug Hofstadter of GEB fame wrote an interesting book on this called Le Ton Beau de Marot (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Ton_Beau_de_Marot) where he argued that 100% translation was pretty much impossible, and machine translation in particular. In that book he translated one poem from French to English thirty-six times, each time capturing some nuance of the original, but showing that no single translation could possibly capture everything.
The delay and imperfections would mean you communicate less than half the speed you would if you spoke the language natively. That's going to get annoying quickly.
Automated translation can get 90% of the way there, and we're very close to this point already. But for that final 10%, you basically need full AI that's capable of actually comprehending the subject matter in order to provide an adequate translation.
I think that's probably more than a couple decades out.
There's still nuances and subtleties that will be lost in machine translation (I'd assume it would still strong AI to have otherwise), so there is still plenty reason to fully learn a language. However, learning a language at the junior high/high school level of two years or so of minimal study probably can be replaced by machine translation in terms of being able to communicate basic thoughts.
Agreed. It will take a while to have "offline" translators available, but, if we can extend Moore's Law and increasing storage densities - then I'll conservatively predict that in 20 years, we'll have a pretty close to flawless babel fish like technology available, and that's just so we have five years to move the "online translation" technology to a local device. There are a number of research projects that are starting to make progress in this area.
2015 We will have universal dictionary lookup capability for most languages, and will have word-word translation in spoken, clearly written (handwriting AI is a long ways off - I'll make no predictions there), read, and listened to language. We will also have the capability to convert between all four (Write down a word in English, have it displayed and spoken out in French)
2020 will be the year that we'll start to see reasonably good translation systems that take into account some amount of nuance beyond word-for-word translation. This will be in a research environment, but will quickly move out of that environment into commercial applications.
2025 will be the year that Translation, as a skill set, will start to be replaced by machines - in particular, subtitling for movies into local languages will be predominantly done by machine system for all but the highest end productions.
2030 will be the year that we can write, read, speak, and understand, anyone in the world in each of our native languages, anywhere, any time. It will also be the year that Language Translation systems will be seen as a reasonable alternative to human translators.
So, as long as you plan on being a translator before 2030 - you should be okay - after that, all bets are off as to whether you have a career.
The other thing that is interesting, when speaking about nuance and such, is that a good translator that uses tweets, emails, other translated discussions, is that I can get instantly translation of emerging memes and subtleties in a language.
This just brings you into the uncanny valley of NLP. To say that this is almost as good as native fluency is like saying that current CG animation is almost photo-realistic. Like so many things in technology, closing the gap of the last percent turns out to be as hard as the first 99 put together.
The need for phrasebook-level fluency in another language may be diminished soon by technologies like these though.
Language is more than just words. It's culture, a way of thinking, a new point of view. If you're not interested in those things than you almost certainly never needed to learn a foreign language (English will get you by in most places and if you don't care about culture, why worry about the places it wont?).
