The Imminent Fall of the Language Barrier Brings Huge Cultural Challenges

The time has come when machine translation, first conceptualized in the 1960s, is finally useful. Google and hundreds of smaller companies have developed algorithms, mined data, used human translation examples and employed syntactic and contextual analysis and every tool in the book to come up with software that essentially breaks down the language barrier completely. You can now automatically translate every website, and in most languages the result is acceptable. Twitter offers a link under every foreign-language tweet to translate it into a foreign language to translate. Some social networks always appear in your preferred language, translating content on the fly. WeChat has a translation option for every chat that is surprisingly good.