Years ago, after graduating from culinary school, I lived for a while with relatives in Switzerland, often cooking them dinner and asking my aunt, who spoke limited English, how it tasted. Every night she would pat me on the shoulder and say, "It’s fine.” I spoke none of the multiple languages she was fluent in, but one time I could have sworn she described a meal to my uncle as "gross”. I became a journalist instead.
It was only years later that I learned one translation for gross, or groß, in Swiss German is… great. And fein means something closer to elegant, delicate, even delicious. If I had a tool to accelerate my understanding, I might have made different life choices.
I thought of that night when I read about the latest Apple Inc AirPods, which can translate foreign languages in real time. A person speaks to you in English, French, German, Portuguese or Spanish (with more languages on the way), and Siri repeats it in your native tongue. It’s an incredible inflection point for futuristic personal tech, with the potential to open up the world in ways humans have dreamed about for millennia. And yet I feel sad for how much we may lose, especially when travelling abroad.
According to the Bible, the diffuse languages of the world were handed down from Heaven as a punishment for human ambition, a way to limit mankind’s belief in its own importance over the divine. But cautionary tales have never much bothered Silicon Valley. Technology has already all but eliminated the chance of getting lost on our way to dinner, limiting opportunities to stumble upon things we didn’t even know we were looking for. What happens when we stop misunderstanding, misreading and mistranslating? How much serendipity – and comedy – will simply cease?
Some of the best dishes I’ve ever eaten abroad showed up after I accidentally nodded yes when I meant no to a waiter listing specials faster than an auctioneer. It’s happened less and less since Google made it possible to translate a photo of a menu in real time, but my anecdotes have suffered. It would have made for a much better story if in Vietnam I’d actually ordered the goat testicles, thinking I was asking for chops.
And so I worry, not simply that someone might end up in a sweaty kitchen instead of becoming a writer prone to eating microwaved peas for dinner, but also that we will lose what remains of our motivation to learn languages when urgency to understand is suddenly stripped away.
Americans and Brits are already broadly derided for their overconfidence when travelling abroad – our willingness to traipse around the world with the assumption that we will be able to speak English and be understood. It’s not instinctive for English-speaking tourists to learn basic pleasantries before going on a trip to Italy or Spain, the way it might be for speakers of other languages.
The new AirPods – which can also translate speech into writing – only exacerbate this complacency. Sure, you might get what you want faster by holding up your phone, but isn’t there more to gain from the embarrassment of slightly mispronouncing your request for a table for two? At least you will have tried.
Without understanding, we observe more closely, we read physical cues. We slow down. We watch what they do so that we can copy it. We make mistakes, embracing an increasingly rare experience in our day-to-day: failure.
To try is "cringe,” especially in front of others. But travelling, being a foreigner, is one of the truly great opportunities to be outside what makes us comfortable – and to grow from the challenge. A certain amount of friction is an essential part of being a person in the world, and the muscles we develop to deal with it are vital for self-esteem and resiliency. As this friction is removed from our daily life, human beings are, rather than finding themselves more relaxed and connected, feeling lonelier and more anxious.
So few opportunities for not knowing remain. We can judge a date by stalking their LinkedIn profile and sleuthing photos of their middle-school homecoming dance, before ever learning if we like the way they laugh, how they take their coffee or if they’re polite to waitstaff. We decide what looks good on a menu long before we stroll into a neighborhood trattoria. Preparation can make life more streamlined and less stressful, but is the loss of mystery (and surprise, and often embarrassment) really better?
As we become more reliant on technology and artificial intelligence to provide us with answers, there are fewer chances to be inexpert. It is nice, but not good, to be constantly reassured that we are right, smart and have all the answers. Some things in life should be difficult.
I’m not advocating for ignorance: People should commit to learning languages. Gaining another language is not just functionally rewarding, it teaches you to think differently. But there are times in life where things should be new – even completely unintelligible – so you can look at them in their entirety, and appreciate the scale of everything you don’t yet understand.
Our phones and Google Maps already mean we are now rarely, if ever, lost. If you’re walking around with your eyes trained on a map, you’ll get to where you’re going, but you’ll miss so many of the wrong turns and mysteries that make you curious about the world that you’re exploring. Without the barrier of language, the experience becomes even more straightforward, less unknown.
It is so often our missteps – our not knowing – that give life its flavor. Even within language groups, dialects can catch us off-guard. I once announced to a room of Brits that I needed to go put on pants (to them, underpants). The verb "to grab” as in "to grab a taco” in Spain means to do something entirely different – and very NSFW – in Central and South America. I wonder whether the AirPods know that.
The new technology made me think about the 2001 novel Bel Canto by Ann Patchett. When a group of foreign dignitaries and businessmen are taken hostage by a rebel terrorist organisation, the relationships between the characters lay bare how little human communication relies on common language. Her point, on some level, is that language can actually get in the way of human understanding. To believe in love at first sight is to believe that love is its own language, and that spoken dialects are somewhat irrelevant.
Speaking with bilingual friends, they often note that they have subtly different personalities in each language – more subtle in one, more loose or comedic in another. How well can you really know your spouse when you know them only in their second language? Would you gain a deeper understanding if you could hear them in their first? Can AirPods ever be a nuanced enough tool to bridge that divide?
There remain, after all, compelling arguments for keeping a little bit of illegibility in life. "Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to speak fluently with your mother-in-law?” I asked an American friend who married a man from Paris.
"That is exactly why I don’t learn French,” she said. – Bloomberg
