Breaking Language Barriers With Technology

The technological breakthroughs we have witnessed in the past few years have surely made our lives easier and served toward the benefit of societies.

10:50 23 December 2019

Imagine a world without smartphones, smart TVs or other artificially intelligent machines. By transforming almost all aspects of our world, technology is now eliminating language barriers through various methods. Just think of how easy it has become to now speak to anyone without actually having to speak the same language!

 

If you are reading this you probably already know that the digital translation has been around for a while now. The new advancements include the distinction between different dialects, accents, and semantics, which is something that Professional French translations can do online for you. 

Whether you are looking for document translation or you are just trying to communicate with speakers of other languages, here’s how technology has changed the way our modern world works. 

Visual Translation 

Visual translation can be just what you need when you are traveling abroad. If you are using Google Translate, you can actually have an image deciphered and translated. Some applications also have optical character recognition, which helps with translating for the blind by narrating their surroundings. These apps can also read texts aloud. This way, you can actually get the help you need when you are attempting to read road signs abroad, texts in different languages, or even a song you’ve been trying to understand for a while. 

Speech Translation 

Speech used to be converted into translated texts but with the breakthroughs in AI, you can actually listen to the translated speech. Certain apps allow you to immediately listen with your earphones to another person’s translated speech. Things do not have to get lost in translation, all thanks to this feature. You can communicate easily with co-workers or tourists when you are using speech translation applications. 

Multilingual Websites 

Technology translation can help you develop a multilingual web presence. Certain programs allow you to translate webpages into several other languages by creating a mirror site. This way, your audience gets to choose whether they would like to have your webpage translated into their own language or not. If you cannot afford a translation service that translates an entire website you can choose to focus on only a few elements in your page to be translated. 

Classroom Translations 

You can also use technology to break down barriers of languages inside your classrooms. Language teachers tend to witness a lot of students who struggle while acquiring a new language because of the communication barriers. Research has proved that the more comfortable students are in class in their own language, the more likely they are going to learn a new one. That is why teachers are now using technology to integrate translations within their learning environment, which will eventually encourage language learners and help them communicate quickly and efficiently. This way, teachers will deliver their lessons quickly and achieve their targeted results easily. 

Workplace Translation 

If you live in a metropolitan city that is pluralistic and multicultural, you’ll most probably come across people who speak different languages at work. You can easily make use of speech or visual translation at the workplace to communicate clearly with your peers. Even if you do not work in a diverse community, most companies are becoming more interconnected with others across the globe, creating an urgency to communicate transitionally. Using the most updated technological tools will help co-workers avoid difficult exchange of information and miscommunication. 

The Disadvantages of Digital Translation 

Although language barriers are on the way of being abolished because of translation technology, there are still some issues that are yet to be resolved. In spite of how intelligent AI is, some words might still appear in a lexical confusion, some verb tenses may not be accurate, and some contextual meanings might not be clear. Even though most of these problems have been solved through dialectal and idiomatic distinctions, some slang and ambiguous and complex structures tend to get lost in translation. The same confusion can happen with voice translations since intonation and tone need to be very clear for machines to decipher whether the sentences are statements or questions. 

We cannot imagine how our world would be without technology. Translation technology may not be perfect yet, but it is close to perfection. You can now have safer trips, easier communication at work, great results with students, and more now that you are translating everything digitally. Digital translation has given us the chance to feel like we’re all speaking the same universal language.