For professional translation service providers, the efforts by Google to make translation redundant through their online translation machine are frustrating. Any decent translation agency will state that an online translation machine will never be able to replicate the skill, intuition, knowledge and experience of a professional human translator.
However, translation is all about language and while we might think that there is a seemingly endless supply of languages, they are in fact declining in number at an alarming rate.
For the most part the decline in the number of languages spoken around the world is perfectly natural. It is the result of the uncontrollable force of economic and cultural globalization which has come to favour languages such as Mandarin, Spanish, English, Hindi, Arabic, Portuguese and Russian.
To appreciate just how quickly so many languages are disappearing perhaps the following statistic will help put it in context. It is estimated that 90% of the 7000 languages currently spoken today will be extinct by the year 2050.
With this in mind it is highly encouraging that Google had added Cherokee as a supported language on its search engine as it is classified as endangered. There are approximately 300,000Cherokee speaker sin the US and by working with them Google has managed to preserve a language at risk of extinction.
Language is part of culture so the preservation of language is vital to the preservation of culture. Native Americans were settled for thousands of years before Europeans arrived which ultimately began the decline of the Native American languages. So by preserving this language disappearing completely, Google has saved a piece of true American culture.
In the long term, it will be impossible to save every remaining language from extinction, but exactly what will happen to the way language is used is hard to say. Perhaps your translation company will only have a dozen languages or so to translate?
