The linguistic future of the Internet 227
experience real-time smooth visibility of the person(s) we are
talking to – and also, in some applications, the option of see-
ing ourselves as well – thus making irrelevant the communica-
tive inadequacies described in earlier chapters. Of course, whether
these technologies will be welcomed or implemented by, for ex-
ample, the members of those synchronous chatgroups where
anonymityandfantasyaretheessenceoftheinteraction,remainsto
be seen.
The developments which will bring languages together take me
away from the theme of this book, but they should at least be men-
tioned for the sake of completeness. Here we are talking about the
provision of automatic translation of increasing quality via mul-
tilingual browsers. It will still take some decades for translation
devices to leave behind their errorful and pidgin-like character,
and routinely achieve a language level with high-quality grammat-
ical, semantic, and discourse content; but once available, it will be
routinely accessible through the Internet. We can also envisage the
translating telephone, where we speak into a phone, and the soft-
ware carries out the required speech recognition, translation, and
speech synthesis, enabling the listeners to hear our speech in their
own language. It is only a short step from here to Douglas Adams’
‘Babel fish’, inserted into the ear to enable the same thing to happen
in face-to-face communication.^4 The implications of such tech-
nologies on languages have yet to be fully appreciated. Plainly the
arrival of automatic translation will act as a natural force counter-
acting the currently accelerating trend towards the use of English
(or any other language) as a global lingua franca. But there are
more fundamental implications, for, in a world where it is possible
to translate automatically from any one language into any other,
we have to face up to the issue of whether people will be bothered
to learn foreign languages at all. Such a world is, of course, a very
long way off. Only a tiny number of languages are seen to be com-
mercially viable prospects for automatic translation research, and
few of the world’s languages have attracted linguistic research of
(^4) Adams (1979: ch. 6).