That would be insane.-

Thinking of it, the whole "stack" from earbuds to phone to cloud - even in just something so "commonplace" as Assistant or Alexa ...

... Is amazing: All that computing power at our disposal.-

Almost as good as a babel fish!

It's a much older theme, going all the way back to the Biblical legend of the Tower of Babel (hence the name of the fish.) Like most of that material, the Babel myth was probably stolen from the Babylonians or even older cultures.

The powers that be -- whether gods or governors -- tend to feel threatened when people can communicate freely with each other. Don't join their side.

I think it'll greatly increase cultural learning, by increasing the opportunity to interact with people. I've traveled to a lot of countries, and never learned more than a handful of words in each, primarily related to basic service interactions. I enjoyed talking to locals when they spoke English. I couldn't interact in any meaningful way with the vast majority of people, though.

Learning languages is great. If you can become fluent in two that's impressive. Even simple conversational ability in a few languages is impressive. But it's a big world.

I think you’re reading a sense of cultural reductionism in my comment that I didn’t intend.

There’s more to learning a culture than the language. And having a real-time translator makes it possible to enjoy a huge range of cultures much more directly than before. The fact is, I’m not going to learn Chinese and Swahili and Japanese. So my choices are to go through a human translator or nothing if I want to talk to those people.

How is it sad that a technology is going to allow me to directly talk to a huge number of people that I never could have before?

I have to second this. I study Japanese myself and the entire way the Japanese communicate is reflected so deeply in the language. There is so so much nuance to pretty much every sentence they speak and there are certain grammar points that carry more meaning in three syllables than what can be expressed in English or German in a full sentence. And ok turn this way of communicating shapes their culture too I believe. If I were to translate a German conversation into Japanese, even if I did so idiomatically it would most likely come off as a rude exchange, because of all the unapologetic directness in the source language.

I don't see why software couldn't do that, if you give them the context.

That seems like something LLMs could eventually get good at

Vaguely related anecdote: have you ever dictated a number to a French speaker? When you say “forty-two” or “seventy-six”, an English speaker will start writing the 4 or the 7 the moment they hear the “forty” or the “seventy”. The French speaker will also write the 4 the moment they hear the “quarante” in “quarante-deux” (40+2), but when you say “soixante-seize” (60+16), they will (without thinking about it!) only start writing 76 at the end of the whole thing, because after only hearing the “soixante” they can’t tell if they’ll need to write a 6 or a 7.

>If Finnish is not widely known, German is more familiar, and there you can put the "nicht" at the very end of a sentence,

I've never heard of an english speaker doing that.. .. .. NOT!