While workers worldwide ponder how artificial intelligence might affect their livelihoods, there’s one sector where that question is no longer hypothetical. Machine translation has reduced the amount of work available to human translators and interpreters, and depressed their earnings.
When I started reading British books in their original language, instead of the professional translations, they got about 10× funnier. And that’s despite only having B1-B2 reading comprehension. Translations can never capture all of the connotations of a word or phrase.
Your point about learning English might very well be true though. There is a high correlation amongst EU countries, between the average English level of adult citizens, and whether or not popular movies get dubbed or only get subtitles.
YouTube introduced that horrible mandatory auto-dubbing recently. At some point, that might become viable, and that will probably severely impact language acquisition.
They are missing out.
When I started reading British books in their original language, instead of the professional translations, they got about 10× funnier. And that’s despite only having B1-B2 reading comprehension. Translations can never capture all of the connotations of a word or phrase.
Your point about learning English might very well be true though. There is a high correlation amongst EU countries, between the average English level of adult citizens, and whether or not popular movies get dubbed or only get subtitles.
YouTube introduced that horrible mandatory auto-dubbing recently. At some point, that might become viable, and that will probably severely impact language acquisition.