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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…

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…