Tag Archives: translation

Imagine you’ve just arrived in another country, you don’t speak the language, and you stumble upon a construction zone. The air is thick with dust. You’re tired. You still stink like airplane. You try to ignore the jackhammers to decipher what the signs say: Do you need to cross the …

Today’s language translation apps are like self-driving cars: incredibly useful, promising, nearing maturity, and almost entirely powered by machines. It's astonishing that the technology even exists. Even so, machine translation is still clunky at times, if not awkward. Consider a recent conversation I had with my neighbor, Andre, who immigrated …