When I first got interested in the subject, in the mid-1970s, I ran across a letter written in 1947 by the mathematician Warren Weaver, an early machine-translation advocate, to Norbert Wiener, a key figure in cybernetics, in which Weaver made this curious claim, today quite famous: This baffles me.Īs a language lover and an impassioned translator, as a cognitive scientist and a lifelong admirer of the human mind’s subtlety, I have followed the attempts to mechanize translation for decades. Indeed, many thoughtful people are quite enamored of translation programs, finding little to criticize in them. But my skepticism was clearly not shared by these two. How odd! Why would two intelligent people, each of whom spoke the other’s language well, do this? My own experiences with machine-translation software had always led me to be highly skeptical of it. Frank would write a message in English, then run it through Google Translate to produce a new text in Danish conversely, she would write a message in Danish, then let Google Translate anglicize it.

However, to my surprise, during the evening’s chitchat it emerged that the two friends habitually exchanged emails using Google Translate.

As for his friend, her English was fluent, as is standard for Scandinavians. I knew Frank spoke Danish well, because his mother was Danish, and he had lived in Denmark as a child. One Sunday, at one of our weekly salsa sessions, my friend Frank brought along a Danish guest.