Edward Gibson: belief

Transcript context

…Because language is the way for every community like dialects that emerge are a kind of identity for people and sometimes a way for people to say F you to the more powerful people. It’s interesting. So in that way, language can be used as that tool. Yeah, I completely agree. And there’s a lot of work to try to create that identity. So people want to do this. As a cognitive scientist and language expert, I hope that continues because I don’t want languages to die. I want languages to survive because they’re so interesting for so many reasons. But I mean, I find them fascinating just for the language part, but I think there’s a lot of connections to culture as well, which is also very important. Do you have hope for machine translation that it can break down the barriers of language? So while all these different diverse languages exist, I guess there’s many ways of asking this question, but basically how hard is it to translate in an automated way for one language to another?…

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