Alan Jacobs


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In Wittgensteinian fashion, I shouldn’t advance any thesis—but there is food for thought here. With some clever technology built by some clever people, Google has decreed on language and translation, confirming the nonsense of prescriptive rules—a small victory for the descriptive grammarians, if an obvious one—and that Wittgenstein’s remarks on language really bear an effective model of artificial means of learning it. Google Translate might not become better than humans at translation any time soon—perhaps it can’t be done. But at some point it will be good enough: cheaper and more convenient than hiring human translators (for many whose standards are lower, this is already true) or bothering to learn languages ourselves—at which point “good enough” becomes our standard. How do we want our machine translators to work for us?