The Miracle Already Exists

More than a decade ago, I read an article about Google working on a phone that could translate any language in real-time. You’d be able to speak French into your phone, and the person at the other end would hear perfect Spanish. Then they’d answer in their own language, and you, too, would listen as if talking to your neighbor.

The article referenced the Babel Fish from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a science-fiction classic, and that’s exactly what it felt like: a technology too good to be true, the stuff of myth and legend. Exactly seven months later, Google demoed Android conversation mode live on stage at an event. It was clunky, slow, and needed multiple attempts to translate a single sentence, but in essence, that was it! The Babel Fish existed.

Since then, translation features have improved drastically across the board. Most chat windows on marketplaces like eBay and others let you transform messages in one click, if they don’t automatically do it for you. Google Translate has gone from a meme-worthy laughing stock to a tool that can translate entire essays in seconds with great accuracy. And any phone’s dictionary can now do what Android’s conversation mode first showed, except ten times better and more smoothly.

About a year ago, Google showed its latest iteration of live translation. It works right inside Google Meet. You set the languages, activate, and a voiceover will be generated for everything other people in the meeting say, just like they overlay and sync translated audio in news segments. You can hear the original speech in the background, but then, with a minimal delay, you’ll hear it again in the words and grammar you know.

Big technological changes always seem like a surprise. One day, we’re all fiddling with dictionaries, desperately trying to order a pizza in our broken Italian. The next we ramble into our phone, the waiter listens, and her eyes light up. “Sì, certo,” she says and walks off to take your order to the kitchen.

But the truth is that by the time we’re surprised, the technology has been around for a long time. It just wasn’t good enough for us to fully notice. While I read that article and daydreamed about what a world with live translation would be like, a handful of engineers at Google was already building that world. They pushed the doors a few months later, and while they didn’t fling right open, they did budge a tiny bit. Once they could see through the crack, all they had to do was keep pushing. And they did. And here we are. Surprised.

Chances are, the miracle you’re waiting for already exists. It may still take some patience for it to blossom into its final shape, but never underestimate what we can do when we set our minds to an idea—even if we believe it to be so fantastical, we first have to put it in a book telling an imaginary story.