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At this year’s AMTA 2025 conference, I presented some research on a simple but overlooked question: what happens when AI interpreters can not only listen, but also see? Today’s machine interpreting systems, i.e. a specific form of speech-to-speech translation for immediate use, work remarkably well. They can turn spoken sentences in one language into spoken…

When discussions about AI in interpreting arise, they almost always focus on conference interpreting: multilingual summits, corporate meetings, or international events. This focus is unsurprising: conference interpreting is highly visible and associated with prestige, as in the UN or the EU. Yet this emphasis has created a blind spot, both in the practical reality, but…

With Zoom, Apple, and Google jumping in, real-time translation is becoming as ordinary as Wi-Fi. Technologies rarely need to be perfect to change the world. They simply need to be everywhere. Smartphones, cloud storage, and video calls all followed this path: flawed at first, but once they became ubiquitous, their shortcomings mattered less than their…

Discussions about artificial intelligence (AI) in interpreting usually revolve around two scenarios: using AI to support human interpreters or developing machine interpreting systems capable of delivering acceptable results on their own. Many stakeholders still doubt whether AI interpreters are realistic at all, while others already accept them as an emerging reality. A smaller group has…

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…

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…

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…

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:…

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….