Author: claudio

At the beginning of 2025, I wrote a post trying to anticipate what the year would bring for technology and interpreting. As usual with predictions, I got some things right and some things wrong. I was right about the increase in interest in AI interpreting. That trend was unmistakable and has only accelerated. I was…

There is a quiet contradiction in today’s debates about AI and language. Many people insist that machine translation and machine interpreting will never work at a truly high level, at least not anytime soon. At the same time, those very same people express growing alarm about deepfakes: synthetic voices, faces, and videos that are increasingly…

What role, if any, can interpreting studies play in an era in which machines interpret at human — or even super-human — levels of accuracy? To answer this question, one must first accept a premise that many within the field still resist: machine interpreting will become extremely capable. As a researcher in interpreting studies and…

I am happy to share a new edited volume in Linguistica Antverpiensia entitled Machine and Computer-Assisted Interpreting, which I co-edited with Prof. Xinchao Lu from Beijing Foreign Studies University. The volume is published in open access form — as, in my view, every publication in such a niche domain as interpreting should be. I will…

Music has always been deeply influenced by technology. From the invention of new instruments to recording techniques, amplification, synthesizers, samplers, and digital audio workstations, technological shifts have repeatedly reshaped how music is created and consumed. This is particularly true over the last forty years or so. Nothing to do with technology and languages? Bear with…

A few days ago, I was invited to speak at the Franco-German broadcaster ARTE, where one of the topics on the table was the expressiveness of AI-generated voices. It is a timely subject. Voices generated by machines are approaching a point of near-indistinguishability from human speech. Some critics refuse to believe this, insisting that synthetic…

Only a few years ago, end-to-end speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) seemed like one of those technologies that belonged to conference talks and research papers rather than real products. When Google introduced Translatotron in 2019 or META Seamless in 2023, it was a glimpse of what might one day be possible: translating speech directly into speech, without…

Last week, I moderated a webinar on AI Adoption in Interpreting Workflows, organised by GALA’s Special Interest Group Interpreting. The aim was modest but necessary: to look at how AI interpreting is actually being used today, and to invite an open discussion among practitioners and stakeholders. To do that, we brought together two viewpoints that…

Two recent announcements — Meta’s Omnilingual ASR and Translated’s Lara 200 Languages — remind us that progress in AI-driven language technology is far from plateauing. Together, they demonstrate how automatic speech recognition and large language models for translation tasks, the two core components of current machine interpreting systems, are being extended to an impressive range…