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About five years ago, I started raising the flag about declining enrolments in translation and interpreting programs, predicting that this trend will continue and spread across regions. At the time, I earned little more than polite dismissal from institutional representatives. Today, it’s becoming common knowledge: enrolments are dropping, everywhere, and the conversation has finally caught…

I almost didn’t write this article. When I received a last-minute invitation to contribute an essay on training and technology in interpreting, my first instinct was to hesitate. The debate around this topic has become somewhat circular — the same positions, the same arguments — and I wasn’t sure I had anything new to add….

What if effective multilingual communication no longer depended on intelligence at all? That is the starting point of my recent paper, Interpreting without intelligence, blind-reviewed and available in open-access format. Its central claim is simple, but unsettling: AI systems may not need to understand language in the human sense in order to perform spoken translation…

This article first appeared in Multilingual Magazine February 2026 How Our Digital Lives Are Becoming Instantly Multilingual For most of my lifetime, translation was a deliberate act. Someone had to decide to translate a book, subtitle a documentary, dub a film, or localize a website. That decision, often invisible to the reader or viewer, determined…

There is something profoundly human in the effort to overcome language barriers. For centuries, linguistic diversity has been a source of beauty, richness, and misery, but also a practical constraint on mutual understanding. In this context, human translation and interpreting have played a crucial role in enabling the circulation of information, scientific discoveries, and ideas…

A recent article by Vicent Briva-Iglesias and Sharon O’Brien introduces Human-Centered AI Language Technology (HCAILT), a framework that seeks to translate Ben Shneiderman’s Human-Centered AI paradigm into the specific domain of multilingual communication . The ambition is clear: move beyond abstract ethical slogans and provide a structured model for making AI-powered language technologies more reliable,…

We hear this word everywhere, especially, but not only, from its detractors: AI hallucinations. The word has entered everyday language, often used as a catch-all explanation when an AI system confidently says something wrong. In the most general sense, a hallucination refers to a situation in which an AI system produces information that is not…

Voice AI has reached a strange level of maturity. Speech recognition is often solid, language models are fluent, and synthetic voices can sound surprisingly natural, at least when you listen to demos. But the moment you interact with most voice systems, the illusion tends to crack, because the problem is no longer raw capability, it…

Computer-assisted interpreting (CAI) has moved from near invisibility to recurring talking point in both research and professional circles. For most of the history of interpreting, the tools of the trade were minimal: a headset, a notepad, and the interpreter’s cognitive skill. Today, however, computational systems increasingly occupy a place, literally and conceptually, within the interpreting…