When we talk about the rise of AI in language services, the conversation too often gets stuck on automation. Most stakeholders, such as language service providers, scholars, and decision-makers, tend to view technology primarily as a tool to streamline existing tasks, making familiar processes faster, cheaper, or more efficient. But in my view, that’s the…
Author: claudio
End-to-End Machine Interpreting: A Promising Frontier (That’s Not There Yet for Production)
The idea of a machine that listens to speech in one language and instantly speaks it back in another — all in real time, and without missing a beat — has long captured the imagination of researchers, technologists, and organizations working in multilingual communication. This is the vision behind end-to-end machine interpreting: a single AI…
The Rise of AI and the Fall of the Gatekeeper
This article has been first published in Multilingual Magazine. For much of modern history, access to specialized knowledge has required one thing above all else: a professional. Whether it was legal advice, tax planning, language translation, or even medical consultation, the path to expertise ran through a narrow gate, guarded by individuals who possessed not…
Speech Translation and the Illusion of Understanding
Not long from now, we may see simultaneous interpretation move beyond its traditional home, those glass-walled booths at international summits and corporate conferences. For decades, interpreters have worked behind the scenes, their voices flowing invisibly into headsets, turning one language into another with precision and care. It has always been a service reserved for the…
Vibe Coding and the Language Industry: Letting Innovation Flow
In my career at the intersection of language and technology, I’ve often felt like an outsider in the world of code. I never formally studied informatics or learned programming the “proper” way. Instead, I stumbled into it out of necessity, curiosity, and often frustration that the tools I needed as a linguist or translator and…
Against Consensus: On the Need to Break our Echo Chambers
Recently, researchers at MIT conducted a striking experiment1. Participants were divided into three groups and asked to write a short composition. One group relied solely on their own cognitive resources. Another could consult the internet. The third turned to automated writing tools, including ChatGPT. Brain scans revealed a clear — and perhaps unsurprising — pattern:…
AI-First Interpreting Approach: What it is and Why it Matters
The field of multilingual communication is undergoing a profound transformation. This transformation is rapidly ushering in an AI-first paradigm, a reality in which AI will be the default agent for translation and interpreting services. This shift is not distant or speculative; it is already underway, albeit still in the early stages for real-time spoken translation….
Beyond the Hype. Policymakers need advice.
A few days ago I had the pleasure to give a keynote speech titled “Beyond the Hype: Navigating the Promise and Challenges of Technology in Interpreting” at Integrerings- og mangfoldsdirektoratet (IMDi) in Oslo, an institution fostering “equal opportunities, rights and obligations in a diverse society” in Norway. Language technologies have the potential to support institutions…
The 3-phases roadmap of AI Interpreting: Moving towards phase 2.
AI or machine interpreting refers to the use of software to translate one spoken language into another (including sign language) in real-time, without human intervention or post-editing. It’s designed for immediate, dynamic communication, whether remote, face-to-face, simultaneous, or consecutive. Speech translation technology has a fairly long history and has been evolving rapidly in recent years,…
Preparing students for the Day after Tomorrow
Year 2019. Geneva. At a time when technology still seemed distant from the profession of interpreting, I was a young scholar who dared to advocate for a paradigm shift in interpreting. In a panel on interpreter training, I reminded the interpreting academic community of its duty to prepare students and professionals not just for today…