Since the industrial revolution displaced millions of workers, replacing them with machines that were much faster, stronger and more efficient than they, today, many people from a variety of professions also worry about something similar happening to them. The truth is that the rapid advance of technology leaves many people jobless each day.
One area that has seen impressive development and automation in recent years is the translation industry. Today, machine translation is a very useful tool in this field, but there is fear among some translators that this tool may one day replace them. For now, humans remain irreplaceable as translators, and although post-editing is used increasingly more than traditional translation, it does not compare to a translation done by a person of flesh and blood.
But who will come out on top in this “battle” between men and machines? It is easy to imagine that in the near future, automatic translations will gain even more ground, considering the rapid pace of technological advancement. Perhaps in the not-so-distant future, we will have reached a peak in our history: the end of languages! The idea isn’t too much more far-fetched than wi-fi would have sounded a couple of decades ago– surely we will reach a point in which, with the help of electronics or by a simple evolution of the mind, we will be able to communicate telepathically, transmitting ideas directly without words and languages through a purely mental connection, regardless of culture, language or distance. It might sound more like science fiction than reality right now, but the technology of today also would have seemed out of this world to people just half a century ago. The human brain works with electrical impulses and these could be captured and transmitted from person to person. All that’s missing is a genius to figure out a way to do this. And that’s how humans could win the great battle. For now.
