Far more powerful computers (mainly more powerful processors) to translate as fast as
you speak.
More miniaturisation.
The last point is interesting. If this were to be done as a piece of computer software, it would require a computer. Computers are big, and have big monitors and lots of cables and need mains electricity. This makes it awkward to speak to a foreign person because you'd both have to be sitting at a computer.
Over the course of the next ten or twenty years, computers will obviously get a lot smaller as they have done over the last ten or twenty years. I predict that within twenty years, all the software and hardware required to build this translator could be shrunk down into something as small as you could want (skeptics note: who would have thought how small mobile phones could get? Yet they are getting smaller every day). The translator could be manufactured as a kind of hearing aid, with a built in microphone and speaker. This would mean you could speak English and seamlessly talk to any foreign person.
When a device like this is finally built and marketed, they will sell like nothing you can imagine. They will let you speak any language, fluently to anybody, without having to 'waste' years of your life learning it. Eventually, foreign languages will not be taught in school, as they will be replaced by a subject that is deemed more educationally important. Hey! Just like Latin!
Technical Stuff and Feasibility
The kind of software that would let you do this now requires almost 500Mb of storage space, at least a Pentium II processor to get any kind of decent speed out of, and buckets of RAM. Better quality software (read: perfect) that can 'learn' the language would probably occupy several gigabytes of space. No problem for the technology of 2020, eh? If you imagine 20 years ago, we were still using hard disks measured in kilobytes, and computers were still big bulky things.
Why shouldn't a computer be able to learn a language.? All French is, is a set of rules and a big list of vocabulary. All that is required to learn it is an understanding of the rules and a memorisation of the vocabulary. This goes for any language. The rules may be complicated, but as long as they are not random, they are perfectly learnable by a computer. A computer could even be trained to watch TV and pick up new phrases and words as they appear. Different ways of saying things would be stored as different sets of logical instructions.
A good way to look a fool in a few years time is to underestimate technology, especially in the areas of computer science and miniaturisation. This will almost certainly happen sometime in the near future, effectively removing the point of anybody today learning a language.
UPDATE 8th February 1999: Dragon have recently released the Dragon NaturallySpeaking Mobile device. This little thing listens to your speech and recognises, and saves it as text in the device. This is a major step towards the creation of a babelfish device, as it would now be very easy to integrate a tiny little dictionary unit (which are also already avaiLable - you know those things that you type a word into and press French, Spanish, Italian or German to have it translated? One of those). Next, we would need some hardware to synthesise speech, which shouldn't be too hard. We are a lot closer now...
UPDATE 22nd February 1999: There was an article in Frontiers magazine (I think) about exactly this device. They even called it a babelfish. They picked up on the idea of having it in your ear, and seemed to show a button on the device that switched between different languages. It said linguists are getting scared and scientists are getting excited. Perfect. Of course, it hasn't been invented yet, but it can only be so long.
UPDATE 11th January 2000: The huge explosion of the PDA market is the single most important step towards creating a babelfish device. As digital cameras combine themselves with PDA's, Mp3 players and mobile phones, the need for huge amounts of fast storage arises. We already have the 340Mb Microdrive from IBM which can easily hold the current generation of translation programs, along with enough space for multiple languages, a voice recognition program and voice synthesis programs. Larger versions are already in development (up to 650Mb), and Sony's MiniDV system (or whatever it's called) is just about to be released in the UK at 650Mb. PDA's still aren't quite powerful enough for real time translation, but could easily manage only a few seconds delay.
So how do we do it? Really.
The technology exists now. Speech recognition applications are extremely accurate and avaiLable in many different languages. Translation is also very good, and fast on Pentium II's. Voice synthesis is also much better now Lucent have released their version of it. It can do any language and sounds very realistic. The first software that will combine all three will be for WinCE 3.0 when it is released. HP's new super palmtops will have very fast Celeron class processors in, which will make the process almost real time, and of course the palmtop is portable. The next innovation will be the miniaturisation. Powerful palmtops will be the size of the Palm V in a few years time, which by then will have combined itself with a mobile phone to become an all in one data device (or whatever). This would be the size at which it would become a babelfish for real. If you could both hold it up to your ear like a phone, you could both talk and neither of you would be aware of a language difference. Ten years later, minituisation technology will probably have blessed us with an earpiece version of this, as well as near perfect recognition, translation and speech.
UPDATE 11th January 2000: Not bad predictions, eh? WinCE 3.0 hasn't come out yet, but that is pretty much irrelevant now. The first babelfish device will appear on whichever Palmtop OS is the most common, as it will undoubtedly be a hack job done by amateurs piecing together the three component programs (voice recognition, translation, synthesis). The new HP palmtops do indeed have Celeron class (well, the Celeron of early '99) processors running at 133Mhz. This is used well enough for mp3 decoding, so an evolution of this type of lightweight, powerful processor will form part of the first babelfish. The HP Palmtops also include speakers and a microphone, essential items for the babelfish which should become standard features on PDA's, price permitting. Time to make some new predictions then? This time next year, Palmtops will have processors powerful enough to encode mp3's in real time as well as decoding them. Storage devices will offer up to half a gigabyte of fast memory (assuming there are no more earthquakes in Taiwan and obviously, at a hefty price). I don't think mp3 players, digicams, PDA's, pagers and phones will quite have merged, but phones will begin to have more complex operating systems. Your days are increasingly numbered, French.
Would this kill Foreign Languages?
No. People would still learn them, as these people would build the translators, just as only a few people today learn how to program computers, and the rest use them. Languages would become a specialist subject, taken only at degree level, or perhaps earlier. In the first stages of phasing out the teaching of foreign languages, there would be an option not to take a language at GCSE, but they would still be taught at earlier levels.
Note: at this point we have exactly what the Americans have. They don't teach languages as religiously as we do. Do you know why? Because they don't need to. Do you know why? Because they control the world. Their way of doing things is invariably the right way. Anti-Americanists are just incapable of accepting the fact that somebody might be better than us.
Then, kids would have the option of not taking a language at all, and gradually, as more and more kids choose not to take that option (preferring to take Genetic-Nano-Control, or some futuristic topic), more and more schools would not offer that option. Eventually, languages will become just like computer programming - if you want to have a career in it, you learn it. But only if.
What about Foreign People? Will they have to speak English?
No of course they won't. They will still learn their own language, but the translators will work the other way round for them.
However, in the long run, English will be the only language spoken by humans. In a few hundred years time, I expect humans will be living on different planets and different solar systems. The only way for Earth to communicate or trade with these colonies would be to speak English. As humans spread, Earth will become more of a minority, being the only planet not to speak English. Perhaps in a few thousand years time, humans will have colonised the whole galaxy, with 100,000,000,000 planets, all speaking English, and Earth, speaking a hundred or so fragmented languages. They would be forced to speak English, through sheer awkwardness. Why should the universe speak English, you ask? Because it's the law. Any person leaving the planet must be able to speak English. That is true today.
Of course, that's all science fiction, but isn't it more likely than most other kinds of science fiction? Like Frenchmen taking over the universe, for example.
The idea of the earpiece translator is not copyrighted as it has been popular science fiction for years. Anybody please feel free to build one. Not only would you be stupidly rich, but you'd bring happiness to millions of students who are
currently forced to speak a foreign language against their will, myself included.
