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

[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.