I believe machine translation will coevolve with human languages. The utility of machine translation is clear even when the translation is a bit off, so people will be forced to use machine translation anyway and subsequently tweak their own language to have a better chance for machine translators to pick up its meaning. This is actually also a valid strategy to use MT today.
I say this both as someone with a degree in linguistics and who has worked as a programmer for decades, there is no way that will happen. People are never going to stop using cultural references, shortened forms, double meanings, puns, abbreviations, slang, etc. just to make machine translation work better.
> I say this both as someone with a degree in linguistics and who has worked as a programmer for decades, there is no way that will happen. People are never going to stop using cultural references, shortened forms, double meanings, puns, abbreviations, slang, etc. just to make machine translation work better.
In general you are correct, but there is the special case of a person using machine translation as a tool to try and communicate with someone they don't share a language with.
Of course, the first approximation is the person performing all the stereotypical monolingual behaviors of speaking extra slowly and loudly, using pseudo-simplified language, accompanied with exaggerated hand gestures that don't really help.
BTW, I've seen people struggling with voice assistants in almost exactly the same way (absent the hand gestures).
But the point is that people modify their language to try and compensate for communication barriers all the time, and it is just a skill, whether it is speaking to children, or foreigners, or code switching to speak to someone in a different class or subculture. Machine translation adds a new wrinkle to the mix, but it isn't all that different.
Maybe not stop completely, but certainly in some contexts, e.g. when using machine translation to produce text in a language you can passively understand but don't have a large active vocabulary in.
Which I did just yesterday by putting the text I wanted to convey into Google Translate and then tweaking it until the translation looked reasonable. In the end, I still had to postprocess the output a bit, but I ended up with something which I couldn't have written if starting from scratch, which was entirely worth the small pain of using slightly less colorful language.
Of course this is all speculative and I never said intricacies of human languages will disappear, but human is extremely adaptive. Historically there already had been cases where different languages are used for different social contexts, so we can imagine a similar dichitomy between an informal language (not very amenable to MT) and a formal language (amenable to MT).
I attempt this when communicating with Chinese parts of my business where English may not be spoken at all. I also don’t know any Chinese.
I will generally run my English emails through machine translation back and forth multiple times until I find phrasing and word choices which are “bistable” (I get back the original English). I’ll also usually double check specific critical or unstable words using a variety of translation aids (not machine translation) to ensure any (scope-limited) Chinese I write is actually correct.
We do have one native Chinese on my side of the team, and every time I’ve had her check the Chinese she says it’s correct for our technical domain.
So we really are already at the point where we can communicate across languages with surprisingly low error rates.
Isn't Chinese actually a best case scenario for machine translation, with huge amounts of text available, and little if any variance (no tenses, no persons, no plural, no declinations)?
The (very old) machine translation joke: The computer was asked to translate the phrase: "The spirit is strong but the flesh is weak" into Russian. The output was: "The vodka is great but the meat is rotten".
