Machines might soon be able to do all our translating for us. And if they do, people will no longer need to learn foreign languages. But that would be a shame because foreign languages not only help us to understand the world, but also ourselves.
The far-eastern city of Babylon was once home to people who spoke a sacred language. They soon became overconfident and proud, and wanted to be like God. So they decided to build a tower tall enough to reach their creator in heaven. When God came down and saw this, he was filled with anger and confused the Babylonian language so the people who spoke it could no longer understand each other and the Tower of Babel had to be demolished. The Babylonians were then scattered throughout the earth and this is how the world’s languages came into being.
This story of the curse of multilingualism is told by the authors of the Old Testament in the first book of Moses. Some two thousand years later, Alexander Waibel uses technology to overcome the resulting language barrier. Professor Waibel teaches computer science at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and those listening to his lectures get to experience what Babylon was like before the Tower was built. Waibel talks to his Karlsruhe students via video from Seattle in the western United States, nearly 8,300 kilometres away. His technology not only bridges an entire continent and an ocean, but something even more powerful - the diversity of languages.
However, the technology is not yet perfect and often provides some rather odd interpretations, particularly when the speakers mumble. But Microsoft and Google have been working on designing the perfect interpreter for some time now, as have technology giants Baidu and Alibaba in China. Earlier this week, Apple revealed that the latest version of its iPhone operating system will include a translation app which can translate back and forth between 11 languages. One of humankind’s dreams is on the verge of coming true: no more language barriers.
What a relief for tormented students, stressed managers and confused travellers. No more vocab, no more grammar, no more frantic hand gestures – a world without linguistic barriers. Companies could save millions on language courses for their employees and on translation and interpreting costs. In Germany alone, the language industry has an annual turnover of one billion euros.
And yet many people enjoy learning new words, strange sounds and unusual expressions. Two thirds of all Germans speak a foreign language and around one third of them can even speak two or three. They do this primarily while on holiday, on the Internet or when talking to friends. In 2018, more than one million people registered for language courses at adult education centres (up from around 100,000 in the early 1990s).
During the corona lockdown, many people must have put ‘learning a new language’ at the top of their bucket lists. The Berlin online platform Babbel, provider of the world’s best-selling language learning app, recorded a steep rise in registrations. When the lockdown was imposed in March, numbers went through the roof: an increase of 200 percent compared to the same period last year. And most registered for the sheer joy of learning a new language. One third of respondents said they were motivated by an “interest in language and culture”. Only one in eight was learning a language for work. Learning a new language - a leisure activity with a purpose.
Take Ellen Bialystok, a psychologist from York University in Toronto and a pioneer in this field. As early as the mid-1980s, she found that bilingual children were better able to differentiate between the form and content of texts than monolinguals. “Apples grow on noses” – she gave them sentences like this and asked them to check whether they were grammatically correct. The psychologist tells us that many children reacted indignantly to the nonsensical content of this sentence. The bilinguals among them, however, were better able to hide their irritation and concentrate on the grammar (which was absolutely correct). “But this has nothing to do with their language skills,” says Bialystok, “but with how their brains work. They were fundamentally better at dealing with conflicting information.”
And why? The psychologist’s hypothesis is that because both languages are always active in bilinguals, a control system in the brain has to make sure they choose the right words and filter out the other language. Bialystok calls this system executive control. It ensures we focus on what is relevant and ignore distractions. This executive control is continuously being trained by the bilingualism. And that would mean that foreign languages are a way of training the brain.
Research was booming and making considerable advances. Studies claiming that bilinguals could concentrate better on a task and switch between tasks more easily became more common. One of Bialystok’s doctoral students demonstrated this in an everyday experiment: Jason Telner put test subjects into a driving simulator and gave them speech tasks via headphones – as if they were talking on their mobile phones while driving. And, indeed, the bilinguals among them were less disturbed by the distraction while driving.
In a test she conducted with children from socially disadvantaged immigrant families, Bialystok was able to show that speaking a second language could generally be helpful. She wanted to know whether it would benefit the children to not only master the language of their adopted country, but also the language of their parents’ country of origin. And indeed, this group did score better than the monolingual children in terms of cognitive control. In her scientific article on the topic, Bialystok concluded that “bilingualism enriches the poor. Encouraging immigrant children to give up their language of origin is a mistake,” said the psychologist. “It’s a loss for the families and a waste of an opportunity.”
Clahsen is not the only one to have his doubts; scepticism has grown in recent years. In 2019, two linguistics researchers published a survey article for the British Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences. They analysed 800 studies and came to the conclusion that, “The relationship between cognitive control and language learning success is complex and inconsistent.” This is research jargon for ‘we don’t really know’.
But don’t languages have other positive effects? After all, they’re not just about brain power – they connect people, they are a social and cultural technique. So do multilingual people have an advantage when working together? Linguists have also investigated this question. In 2018, psycholinguist Scott Schroeder from the Hofstra University in the US summarised the current state of research as follows: bilingual children really are better at putting themselves in another person’s situation. They have an advantage at what scientists call Theory of Mind – that is, imagining what is going on in the minds of others.
In order to research something like this, psychologists use the “Smarties Test”, for example. They show the child a tube of Smarties and allow them to open it up. But there are no Smarties inside, only buttons. Then they ask the child, “What do you think someone else will believe is in it?” Those who have a good Theory of Mind capacity would answer, “Smarties”. But smaller children often say, “Buttons”. The cognitive researcher Ágnes Kovács conducted this test with three-year-olds in Romania who had grown up in monolingual or bilingual families. The children who were regularly using two languages answered the question correctly twice as often. A remarkable result. However, according to the survey analysis conducted by Scott Schroeder, on average, the advantage is more likely to be small to medium-sized.
*But why are bilingual children better able to imagine what others are thinking? Researchers have several explanations for this. It could be because they constantly have to reflect on whether their counterpart understands both languages or just one – and which one. Or maybe the children are just better at hiding their own point of view, and then the ‘executive control’ comes into play. More recent studies tend to suggest the first explanation. Because even children who are not bilingual, but still come into regular contact with a foreign language, are able to see the world from another’s perspective. According to Schroeder, this could simply be due to their experience that their own language skills differ from those of other people. It sounds simple, but means something quite fundamental: the realisation that there is not only one way of expressing yourself and not just one way of looking at things.
Ellen Bialystok, a pioneer in multilingualism research, thinks another effect of foreign languages is even more important. “The older my test subjects were, the more they benefitted from multilingualism.” It could partially offset cognitive decline in old age. Moreover, when the psychologist looked at the medical records of dementia and Alzheimer patients, she found that the bilingual patients were diagnosed with the symptoms of their diseases three to five years later. Apparently, these people were able to compensate for the loss of thought and memory for a period of time, so the disease only became apparent later on. It could even be seen on brain scans. Bialystok compared images of monolingual and bilingual Alzheimer patients who showed similarly severe limitations. The brains of the bilingual patients were more affected by the disease than those of the monolinguals. But despite the greater damage, they still worked equally well. Bialystok says, “These effects are real”.
Indeed, such findings have survived the fierce controversy surrounding the benefits of multilingualism. Even Harald Clahsen says there are more studies on the elderly that show the benefits for thinking skills. He therefore recommends people learn a language, even if they start later in life. “It is never too late to learn”, he says, having discovered in his experiments that even very old learners can master the grammar of a new language. “Even at 80, people can still do it. I never thought it possible.” Nevertheless, older people do find it harder to learn new vocabulary. Clahsen recommends using language learning apps, “They make up for your weaknesses. They help you revise the same words over and over.”
This is how Hermann Schnitzler, 81, from Grevenbroich near Cologne does it, for example. He’s been learning English on the Babbel online platform for a few years now. “It’s about training my brain by engaging with the language,” says the retired surveyor. “Sometimes I even catch myself thinking in English!” He is interested in technology, science, and especially astronomy, and there’s no avoiding English in those subjects. “I couldn’t imagine navigating the Internet without understanding English.”
For Schnitzler, his hobby is about far more than just training his brain and being able to understand a new language. “To me, English is like a friend who is always there.” He adds a splash of pathos to his cheerful Rhineland accent, In 50 years’ time, he supposes everyone in the world will learn English. Think what that would do for international understanding!
Recently, Schnitzler says, as he was drifting off to sleep, a thought had occurred to him. “You can compare a foreign language to a horse. You can see further sitting on a horse than you can just standing on two legs.” Seeing further increases knowledge, which in turn contributes to understanding. “And knowledge and understanding – that’s education.”
This puts the 81-year-old ahead of all the Babel fish technology, no matter how sophisticated and groundbreaking it may become. Translation technology may soon enable worldwide communication – but getting people to understand the world and other people is something that only a real cultural technique can do. By immersing yourself in a foreign language.
This text originally appeared (in German) in Die Zeit, in edition Nr. 27/2020 on 25th June 2020.
