The study of modern foreign languages and the advent of translation apps
A’yaan Abdul -Mughis
Human knowledge of another language has always been required to communicate across the linguistic barrier. With the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI) translation services such as Google Translate and DeepL Translator, any user can directly input the required communication string in their native language into an app and not only read the result across many languages, but also have it spoken back to them accurately in a range of regional accents. Does this mean that the study of modern foreign languages in schools is now obsolete? Can we bid Auf Wiedersehen to learning vast columns of vocabulary or Khuda Hafiz to the complexities of conjugation? John McWhorter, the American linguist, states that, ‘ A foreign language is a window into a new way of processing the world. ’ 1 I can certainly testify to that, being brought up bilingual in Urdu and English. To start with, English is a fixed word-order language and follows the SVO (Subject-Verb-Object), structure while Urdu allows many possible word orderings. 2 And where English prides itself on a full suite of 14 distinct punctuation marks 3 that are the custodians of clarity and unambiguity in the linguistic domain (think of the strife that would ensue from the incorrect punctuation of ‘ a woman without her man is nothing ’ ), there are fewer constraints on the Urdu literary landscape. Perhaps if this concept could be lifted off the page and extrapolated to daily life, it would explain why the British are so good at queuing, keeping in lane and stopping at red traffic lights, while their Pakistani counterparts feel less constrained to do so. In a similarly lackadaisical vein, once you know that the Urdu word for yesterday and tomorrow is identical, then you are much better placed to understand why you are the only person in the venue two hours after the given arrival time. In fact, there is no one word for punctuality – it is a concept so alien that it needs three explanatory words. Yet in the world of family relationships, Urdu trumps the list of languages with names for every conceivable relationship pairing. English offers no word for two ladies whose children are married to each other, and uses the very generic ‘ aunt ’ for that female sibling of either parent through a bloodline or marriage. This is simply unacceptable in Urdu, which has a snappy two-syllable word for the former, five distinct words for aunt (delightfully alliterative ones like phophi and chachi ), five for uncle and ten for cousin, depending on exactly which branch they occupy on the family tree. Extended family, then, is tellingly the base unit of this society, rather than the nuclear family or the individual.
That is the window that McWhorter is referring to: the ability to gain access to a different mindset and way of seeing the world. To roll words on your tongue that carry concepts that don’t exist in another
1 McWhorter, J. Will Translation Apps Make Learning Foreign Languages Obsolete? https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/25/opinion/translation-apps-foreign-languages.html. Consulted: 19/7/2024. 2 Jawaid, B. & Zeman, D. (2011) ‘Word-Order Issues in English-to-Urdu Statistical Machine Translation’, The Prague Bulletin of Mathematical Linguistics 95: 87–106. 3 https://www.grammarly.com/punctuation. Consulted: 19/7/2024.
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