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How AI is reshaping foreign-language education

A new generation of translation tools threatens to upend how people understand different cultures.

An animation of different languages saying "Bye!"
Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani

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When I was a kid, I felt hypnotized by the shelves in my best friend’s apartment. They contained, it seemed, endless volumes of Japanese-language books—including, most crucially to a child’s eye, comics such as Dragon Ball and Urusei Yatsura. I was gazing at an impossibly distant world; I wanted so badly to comprehend the stories on those pages, but translations wouldn’t be published in the United States until years later.

Those early experiences motivated my study of Japanese in high school and college. But if I were a teenager today, I might be tempted to skip over the courses altogether. Translation…

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