Will We Still Learn Languages When Machines Can Translate? (with Abby Walker)

Live AI translation tools are making it easier to converse across languages without a human translator, a phrasebook, or years of study. So will we all just stop taking Spanish or Mandarin classes? Sociolinguist Abby Walker (liberalarts.vt.edu/departments-and-schools/dep…) doesn’t think so. She shares the many reasons we learn new languages, some of which have little to do with functional communication at all. We also hear how one AI-assisted conversation brought two future in-laws together, why machine translation is still so darn buggy, and why some languages are attracting a resurgence of new learners even in the age of translation apps.

Life, Automated is a production of the Ryan Institute on Complexity, at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management. The host is Jess Love, senior director. Distributed by KQED (kqed.org/podcasts/lifeautomated).

Producer: Jesse Dukes

Music: Steven Jackson

Recording: George Christensen, Will Feeney

Promotional help from Ananya Mallapragada

Editorial guidance from Laura Pavin

Special thanks to Larry Berliner and Georgi Demirev for their help testing out live translation tools