Why you can never rely on Google Translate
If you're of the opinion that the existence of Google Translate – and a dozen other online translation applications – means that you never have to bother becoming bilingual, guess again. While online translation apps are good for getting a sense of what's been typed out in a foreign language, it turns out that they're rather useless if you want to use them to hold a conversation with anyone.
In his latest video YouTuber Tom Scott takes us through the some of the problems that occur with online translation and points out that while Google Translation is certainly capable of matching words and concepts provided it has the contexts to work with, it misses out a lot of the subtle nuances of conversational language. Our favourite example in the video is when Scott points out that an American and an English person saying "that's a brave idea!" don't mean the same thing.
