Tiêu đề PART 69.pdf ✅

The Economist August 19th 2023 sense of awe. There is the wondrous quiet of the rubber-tyre-wheeled Paris Metro carriages, compared with the bone-jan- gling rattle of the London Tube. There is also its sheer density. The French capital's underground has 225km of tracks, com- pared with 40okm in London, yet serves 304 Metro stations, by the author's count, 32 more than the Tube. The names of Metro stations evoke his- tory at every turn: Pyramides and Iéna (sites of Napoleonic battles) and Montpar- nasse-Bienvenuë (paying tribute to the network's chief engineer, Fulgence Bienve- Johnson Yo hablo AI nuë). Even stations named after humdrum street intersections take on a lyrical quali- ty: Marcadet Poissoniers, Maubert Mutu- alité. Strange things go on underground. The first recorded murder on the Metro, Mr Martin notes, took place in 1937 at the Porte de Charenton. Laetitia Toureaux, an Italian immigrant suspected of spying, worked in a wax factory by day and, in her free time, as a dance partner for hire at a local music hall. At one Metro stop, she was seen step- ping into a carriage; at the next, she was found with a nine-inch knife in her neck. A literary work this is not, as Mr Martin Culture 73 might concede, judging by his self-depre- cating style. He has ignored certain French conventions, refusing to refer to the right and left banks of the Seine, and makes some odd observations. "How's that going to play out", the author asks of gendered French, "in an increasingly androgynous world?" Nor is Mr Martin well-briefed on the politics of future urban planning in the capital. But as a sincere love letter from a Brit to a French public-transport network under strain, it is a timely reminder of what makes Metro-goers happy when they spend time underground.■ With new technology, learning foreign languages will become less essential N HOLIDAY, MANY will find them- O selvesin placeswhere they do not speak the language. Once upon a time, they might have carried a phrasebook. The rise of English has made that less necessary. But most people-at least seven of the world's eight billion-still do not speak English. That leaves options like pantomime, a willingness to be surprised by what arrives at dinner-or, increasingly, technology. More and more people are using simple, free tools, not only to decode text but also to speak. With these apps' con- versation mode, you talk into a phone and a spoken translation is heard mo- ments later; the app can also listen for another language and produce a transla- tion in yours. You may still get a surprise or two. Google Translate may be the best-known name in machine translation, but it often blunders. Take "my wife is gluten- free," the kind of thing you might say at a restaurant abroad. In French or Italian, Google Translate renders this as "my wife is without gluten"-true to the words rather than the meaning. DeepL, a rival, does better, offering various options, most of them along the correct lines. The best tool may not be a translation app at all. Though not marketed for the purpose, ChatGPT, a generative AI system that churns out prose according to users" prompts, is multilingual. Rather than entering an exact text to translate, users can tell ChatGPT to "write a message in Spanish to a waiter that my wife and I would like the tasting menu, but that she is gluten-free, so we would like sub- stitutions for anything that has gluten." And out pops aperfect paragraph, in- cluding the way Spanish-speakers actu- ally say "my wife is gluten-free": mi esposa es celíaca. It is a paraphrase rather than a translation, more like having a native-speaking dinner companion than an automated interpreter. Travel has long been a motivator for study-unless people start to feel AI tools offer a good-enough service. Some are concerned that apps are turning language acquisition into a dwindling pursuit. Douglas Hofstadter, a polyglot and poly- math writer, has argued that something profound will vanish when people talk through machines. He describes giving a halting, difficult speech in Mandarin, which required a lot of work but offered a sense of accomplishment at the end. Who would boast of taking a helicopter to the top of Mount Everest? Others are less worried. Most people do not move abroad or have the kind of sus- tained contact with a foreign culture that requires them to put in the work to be- come fluent. Nor do most people learn languages for the purpose of humanising themselves or training their brains. On their holiday, they just want a beer and the spaghetti carbonara without incident (and sometimes without gluten). As AI translation becomes an even more popular labour-saving tool, people will split into two groups. There will be those who want to stretch their minds, immerse themselves in other cultures or force their thinking into new pathways. This lot will still take on language study, often aided by technology. Others will look at learning a new language with a mix of admiration and puzzlement, as they might with extreme endurance sports: "Good for you, if that's your thing, but a bit painful for my taste." This is largely an Anglophone pro- blem, since native English-speakers miss out on the benefits of language-learning most acutely. In many countries, in- cluding Britain and America, schools' and universities' foreign-language de- partments have been closing. (The Brit- ish government recently devoted a mod- est fund to trying to get more secondary- school pupils to study foreign languag- es.) In the rest of the rich world, there is one thriving language that people still study: English. And in poorer countries, many people are multilingual as a matter of course; Africans and Indians learn languages because they are surrounded by them. But a focus on the learner alone misses the fundamentally social nature of language. It is a bit like analysing the benefits of close relationships to heart- health but overlooking the inherent value of those bonds themselves. When you try to ask directions in broken Japa- nese or mangle a joke in halting German, you are making direct contact with someone. And when you speak a lan- guage well enough to tell a story with perfect timing or put subtle shading on an argument, that connection is more profound still. The best relationships do not require an intermediary.