Lost in Automatic Translation: Navigating Life in English in the Age of Language Technologies

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Vered Shwartz (University of British Columbia, Vancouver)

Lost in Automatic Translation

Navigating Life in English in the Age of Language Technologies

Vered Shwartz (University of British Columbia, Vancouver)

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English

Cambridge University Press
31 July 2025

Sociolinguistics; Psycholinguistics; Translation & interpretation; Natural language & machine translation

The last decade has seen an exponential increase in the development and adoption of language technologies, from personal assistants such as Siri and Alexa, through automatic translation, to chatbots like ChatGPT. Yet questions remain about what we stand to lose or gain when we rely on them in our everyday lives. As a non-native English speaker living in an English-speaking country, Vered Shwartz has experienced both amusing and frustrating moments using language technologies: from relying on inaccurate automatic translation, to failing to activate personal assistants with her foreign accent. English is the world's foremost go-to language for communication, and mastering it past the point of literal translation requires acquiring not only vocabulary and grammar rules, but also figurative language, cultural references, and nonverbal communication. Will language technologies aid us in the quest to master foreign languages and better understand one another, or will they make language learning obsolete?

By: Vered Shwartz (University of British Columbia Vancouver)
Imprint: Cambridge University Press
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
ISBN: 9781009552332
ISBN 10: 1009552333
Pages: 208
Publication Date: 31 July 2025
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Vered Shwartz is Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia and a Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) AI chair at the Vector Institute. She specializes in natural language processing and has published extensively in top-tier journals and conferences.