New AI tools promise real-time translation so you don't have to. But
is that a good thing?
Jonathan Ore
| CBC Radio | Posted: June 7, 2025 8:00 AM | Last Updated: June
7
Google, Apple rolling out new tools that translate your speech
on the fly
Image | Google Meet live translation demonstation
Caption: Two people speak via Google's Meet live translation
service, during a demonstration at Google's I/O event in May.
(Google)
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Media Audio | The Sunday Magazine : Will we still need to learn
foreign languages if AI can do the translating?
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There's a suite of new and upcoming tools designed to make
translation between languages easier and faster than ever
before — some, with the help of artificial intelligence.
At their I/O 2025 event, for example, Google revealed a live
translation service it's added to its Google Meet
videoconferencing tool. A demonstration showed two people
speaking to each other — one in English, one in Spanish — with
their speech translated into the other language with a short,
seconds-long delay. The computer-generated voice mimicked the
original speaker's voice and intonation.
Roger J. Kreuz, a professor at the University of Memphis who
specializes in the psychology of language, said Google's live
translation demonstration was "a pretty amazing technological
achievement," but its staged nature left questions about how it
will work in a real meeting.
"Conversations are rarely as clean as the conversation that we
saw in the demo," he said. "They typically will overlap or
interrupt, and I can only imagine the cacophony that would
occur if people were kind of excitedly talking back and forth
... and voices cutting in and then cutting back out again. How
is that controlled?"
Experts caution tools like this raise big questions about what
might get lost in translation. Because while tech companies
often tout these tools as scientific and objective, language
doesn't really work that way in the real world.
In March, Bloomberg reported that Apple is planning to update
their AirPod earbuds to allow them to translate languages from
speech it hears on the fly. (Google's rival product, the Pixel
Buds, have had this feature for years, the report said.)
Apple's reported foray into the live translation game is
notable, says WIRED journalist and senior business editor
Louise Mataskis, because the company typically doesn't
introduce new tech features as quickly as others.
Image | 2171047190 Apple AirPods
Caption: Apple AirPods are displayed during an Apple special
event at Apple headquarters on Sept. 9, 2024, in Cupertino,
Calif. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
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"They tend to hold back until that technology is really mature
and that there is a good sense that it's gonna be reliable. So
I think that this shows that this technology is really starting
to mature," she told The Sunday Magazine's Piya Chattopadhyay.
Google's speech translation currently only features translation
between English and Spanish, and it's available only in the
U.S. to anyone paying for their Google AI Pro premium services.
The company says it doesn't save users' audio, no AI models are
trained using your voice, and the feature is opt-in only.
A representative from Google told CBC the service will add more
languages "in the next few weeks." They said the feature uses
an AI large language model called AudioLM, developed by Google
DeepMind.
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'Do you have a toilet in your house?'
Mataskis says language tools can help people practice learning
languages, but cautions that while the tools or apps often
present themselves as neutral — i.e. there's only one right way
to translate a word or phrase — it might miss important
contextual or cultural variations.
"In Mandarin, we don't give people possession of things at
their job. So you would never say, in Mandarin, 'do you have a
bathroom?' You would say, 'where is the bathroom in this
place?'"
Mataskis, who used Google translate when she first started
learning Mandarin abroad in Taiwan, got quizzical looks when
asking the former in coffee shops. "Often these baristas would
look at me funny and I didn't realize that basically I was
saying 'do you got a toilet in your house?'"
What's more, the kind of translations you get can inform how a
tool's language database was trained. Mataskis says that as
she's learned more Mandarin, her "hunch" is that translation
tools use Chinese state media texts.
Image | Meta Connect Conference
Caption: Mark Zuckerberg speaks about the live translation
feature on the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses during the Meta
Connect conference on Sept. 25, 2024, in Menlo Park, Calif.
(Godofredo A. Vásquez/The Associated Press)
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"It's sort of using these like, honorifics to refer to the
Chinese Communist Party. Or, like it can be sort of stifled in
the way that state media and or government documents are often
— you know, sort of very dry and use a lot of formal language,"
she said.
Kreuz notes that, historically, translation apps have had
trouble detecting and properly translating sarcasm or
homophones. He ran into the latter when the Turkish translation
for one of his books apparently missed the mark on the title.
"I put the title into Google translate. This is 2018.
Apparently, literally, it meant: How to Achieve Fluency in a
Foreign Language. And what it gave me was: How To Earn Fluency
on Foreign Dildos, which was just bizarre," he said.
WATCH | AI coming to classes around Canada
Media Video | AI coming to classes around Canada
Caption: AI is now a daily tool for many but experts say it's
still not widely understood. The Alberta Machine Intelligence
Institute, AMii, is getting a $5 million gift from Google to
shape artificial intelligence courses at 25 post-secondary
institutions across Canada.
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Language as biodiversity
Muhammad Abdul-Mageed, Canada Research Chair in natural
language processing and machine learning, says that companies
should take extra care when building AI translation tools for
international languages that may have little in common with
European ones.
Certain sounds an English speaker makes, for example, may have
no equivalent in Arabic, which could present challenges for
tools expected to make instant translations.
"We cannot really paint all these languages with the same
brush, in a sense," he said.
Abdul-Mageed has been doing work with African languages of
late, in the hopes of helping develop sophisticated tools to
translate between them as easily as a Google or Apple might
focus on English and other European languages.
Image | Louise Mataskis Muhammad Abdul-Mageed
Caption: Louise Mataskis, left, is a journalist and senior
business editor at Wired magazine. Muhammad Abdul-Mageed,
right, is Canada Research Chair in natural language processing
and machine learning. (Submitted by Louise Mataskis and
Muhammad Abdul-Mageed)
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Doing the work to preserve languages can be seen as another way
of preserving biodiversity, he argues — and advances in machine
learning and other technologies could be powerful tools to do
so.
"We want to preserve the animal kingdom, the plant kingdom, and
so on. Language is part of us, right? And if we let certain
languages go, we are letting parts of us go," he said.
As convenient as live translation can be, it's no substitute
for learning and eventually becoming fluent in a second or
third language on your own.
Mataskis says she's spoken to researchers who have found that
learning more languages can improve your brain's
neuroplasticity. "So there's quite literally health benefits to
learning a second language," she said.
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She wants to encourage people to use any of the new language
tools, including those powered by AI, as a potential learning
aid rather than a crutch.
Using it that way can help set you up for the next, possibly
best nonacademic setting to learn: going to the bar with a
friend fluent in that language and just hanging out and talking
together.
"Think about these tools as a way to facilitate that
connection, rather than to be an intermediary between you and
this other person," she said.
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