Is there no / any longer a reason / need to learn a foreign language?
Or, to put it another way, in the words of Douglas Hofstadter,
Learn a Foreign Language Before It’s Too Late
AI translators may seem wondrous but they also erode a major part of what it is to be human.
The Atlantic (7/13/23)
Hofstadter recounts how he spent years of painstaking, hard labor learning more than half a dozen foreign languages, though he never came close to mastering any of them except French and Italian.
But today we have Google Translate. Today we have DeepL. Today we have ChatGPT—and so on. There’s no need for me to list all the powerful technologies that allow anyone today—a monolingual American, say, who has never devoted a single moment to learning, say, Chinese—to write fluent passages in Chinese. Today it’s a piece of cake to send an email in a tongue you don’t know a word of. You just click on “Translate” and presto! There it is! Or at least, there it is, in a certain sense. Assuming that there are no egregious translational blunders (which there often still are), what you are sending off is slick but soulless text.
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