Lost in Automatic Translation

by Vered Shwartz

The last decade has seen an exponential increase in the development and adoption of language technologies, from personal assistants such as Siri and Alexa, through automatic translation, to chatbots like ChatGPT. Yet questions remain about what we stand to lose or gain when we rely on them in our everyday lives. As a non-native English speaker living in an English-speaking country, Vered Shwartz has experienced both amusing and frustrating moments using language technologies: from relying on inaccurate automatic translation, to failing to activate personal assistants with her foreign accent. English is the world's foremost go-to language for communication, and mastering it past the point of literal translation requires acquiring not only vocabulary and grammar rules, but also figurative language, cultural references, and nonverbal communication. Will language technologies aid us in the quest to master foreign languages and better understand one another, or will they make language learning obsolete?

Genres: Language

206 pages, Paperback

Published August 21, 2025

Reviews

[Lang · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an interesting read and gave me a new perspective on machine learning/LLMs, a topic I'm generally against for numerous reasons but I appreciated the author's passion for it, she helped me understand how this technology works a bit more and its limitations. I enjoyed her clear, accessible writing style; she even mentions how she avoids complicated prose as to not get it wrong (the author is not a native speaker of English). She breaks down complicated topics well, adding in her own opinions and even the occasional joke. The book provided a lovely overview of the structure and some of the quirks of English (which I'm sure apply to other languages) without being overly academic or technical. I would say this was more of a linguistics book than a book on AI, but she always connected the topics back to translation technology.

[Patrick Pilz · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is essentially a book about language, grammar and communication and the difficulty of translation in general. I expected more details on existing translation technologies, comparisons on which are better than others and a nuanced review of challenges of automated translations in general. Instead, this book explained in great at times in a very boring and repetitive style the overall challenges humans as well as machines have with translation.

It is still a fascinating book, but the title is misleading.