Lost in Automatic Translation: Navigating Life in English in the Age of Language Technologies (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781009552363)

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?

Author: Vered Shwartz
ISBN-10: 1009552368
ISBN-13: 9781009552363
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Language: English
Published: 08/21/2025
Pages: 208
Format: Hardcover