Asakiyume mita

As a kid, I learned English from English language cartoons on FilmNet. I learned from German TV shows. My passion for Swedish crime series taught me Swedish.

But now, the largest tv medium of our time, YouTube, has begun auto-translating everything. Future generations will not be exposed to foreign languages and be inspired to take an interest. (Source)

Apparently the poster is talking not about auto subtitling but auto dubbing. Auto subtitling would be bad enough, but auto dubbing? Terrible. I too have relied on films, TV, and songs for every language I've ever learned. Having all the languages of the world put into English, ostensibly for my benefit, feels like having all the delicious foods that people cook all over the word turned into hamburgers and french fries because that's what I, as an American, am supposed to eat.

In science fiction, you get translation tech. Unless the point of the story is to talk about language (hello Darmok), this tech generally works flawlessly. In some stories, second-rate or old fashioned translation tech is used to humorous effect (Ann Leckie did this in one of her novels, and someone else I read in the past few years did too, but I'm forgetting who). But in all the stories, the tech is omnipresent and everyone uses it.

Obviously translation and interpretation services are hugely important. I want these services to exist. And I do appreciate what Google Translate makes possible. But there's a difference between having something as an option and having it inescapably, ubiquitously present. No one in Star Trek has to learn another language--ever. They just speak, and hear, their own.

This means their ears don't get to hear the different sounds that these languages make. The tones, the clicks, the trills, the glottal stops, the vowel and consonant clusters. (And we're not even getting into how the aliens may sound, if sound is even how their languages are embodied.)

But even worse, it means they can never be truly intimate with someone who speaks a different language. They can never be alone together, just the two of them. There's always a third party present, sliding neatly between them in bed, sitting with them at breakfast, standing between them as they contemplate where next to boldly go. It's just you and me and the translation software, my love. It's just you and me and our neural interfaces, which somehow will figure out how to convey circumlocutions, veiled sarcasm, passive aggression, tentative queries. These things can take us a lifetime to master in our mother tongue, but the tech is clever enough to do all that for us--across languages. In the end, do I love you, or do I love the translation tech? Cyrano de translation tech.

I'm thinking I might want to play with this in a story sometime: ardor driving someone to the boldness of learning their beloved's linguistic ways so they can speak with them face to face, no longer through a [tech] mirror darkly.