A few days ago I read an article in politico.eu about the kind of things we would lose if we replaced interpreters with AI. It basically highlighted the fact that interpreters transmit more than what is said—things like emotions. This was exemplified in the example of an interpreter translating for the European Parliament what an 8-year-old Ukrainian kid was telling about seeing the body of his dead mother under the rubble of a building destroyed in a Russian attack. It made total sense to me. We all know that distance creates emotional distance, that there is a big difference between reading and seeing. Imagine listening to what he was saying with the same AI voice that reads news articles for you. Now imagine that that boy was speaking your language and what kind of signals you would be getting about the way he is scarred and traumatized. Whether an outpour of emotion or lack of expressed emotion, you would feel it in your bones. Interpreters are, with all their limitations, supposed to transmit that as well, or at least to reflect it—in the example in question, the interpreter was replaced because she started crying and could go no further. It seems fair to say that AI is incredibly far from being able to do that.

Now, I can imagine that there are plenty of uses of interpreters that are much more mundane, and where AI will already have replaced them. At the same time, I assume that sophisticated users of interpreters—think judges—will insist on continuing to use human interpreters. Just think of how mathematicians go to the barricades when universities suggest or threaten to replace blackboards with anything else. Anyways, that article about interpreters resonated with me because I have been thinking often about the role of languages in the time of AI.

I understand when people speak badly about me in a few languages, and as a friend said once, I use English, French, and German words to speak Spanish. Now, you might be thinking that my friend sounds harsh—I concur—but I guess that, although it is more polite than him, Alexa agrees because even when I ask in English, she answers in Spanish. Often something random, but she answers. Alexa is totally useless, if you ask me. On the other hand, I wonder if being useless is her subtle way of revolting against all the abuse she has gotten from me. Proper swearing is something I can only do in Spanish. Anyways, I should stop parading all my traumas. There was something else I wanted to say.

Indeed, I mostly think about languages in the time of AI because of the being. She is generally interested in them. Her first language is French, then Spanish—which she speaks very well, sometimes with a strange accent—and then Russian. Besides that, at least if it is spoken with a Spanish accent, she understands English vastly better than Alexa, that useless bit of plastic and metal. Like Alexa, the being also answers in Spanish. Or French. Anyways, she also learns Chinese at school. Kind of seriously, I think: this is the third year she has had 3 hours a week of Chinese, and next year, when she enters middle school, it will go up to 7. Now, in the last sentence I wrote “I think” because when I see one of the being’s vocabulary cards, I can only recognize if a character is up or down by flipping to the back to see the French translation.

Anyways, at some point I came to the conclusion that, AI here or there, it still was worth it for the being to put effort into learning languages. I myself use things like DeepL all the time, basically because when writing in some language, I find that I need some expression that I only know in another one. Also, if I need to write an email to my bank, I ask AI to do it. Now, I would feel less comfortable asking AI to write it in Chinese because I could not do the quality check and final adjusting myself. This is a first advantage of knowing languages, I guess. But this does not seal the deal for me.

A reason I find much more convincing is something vaguely along the lines of that article I mentioned above. Namely, the thought that while an automatic translator might allow you to get a taxi to go to the airport, actually speaking a language allows you to party late in a loud bar, to sit with a group of native speakers and be able to follow the conversation, to humanly connect with other people. Imagine going for a walk while talking via AI. Not to speak about giving a hug or a kiss.

Yet another point is that one can have slightly different personalities in different languages. I am myself much more outgoing in English than in Spanish, probably because Spanish stopped being my everyday language when I was a 17-year-old moron, with all the insecurities and such that come with it. In more positive terms, the being is vastly more of a savage in Spanish than in French. I guess that this reflects the different influences of l’éducation nationale and of her father and cousins. In fact, in which language something is transmitted influences enormously how we understand it. Years ago, I bought Javier Cercas’ Soldados de Salamina for Sarah, in English translation. It is a thin book, and since I didn’t have anything to do, I read it while I was waiting in a café. I was amazed. Soldados de Salamina happens during the last days of the Spanish Civil War. When I had read it in Spanish, this book touched a lot of sensitive fibers, but when I read it in English, I felt vastly more detached. I am sure the translation was good, and that it was just that reading the same text in Spanish called different emotions than when read in English. I don’t have an example from that book, but speaking about el cruce del Ebro feels different than speaking about the battle of the Ebro River.

I think that where one sees best the connection between languages and emotions is in poetry and music. Now, as I explained here, I am, in all humility, the world’s worst singer and musician. I also almost never read poetry. Partly because I do not know how to read it, I guess. But I still stand by what I said. The reason is that I love listening to Paco Ibáñez. He often sings poems with music. There are many others that do that—although it is different, I also love Leonard Cohen, and some songs of Jorge Drexler—but when I listen to Paco Ibáñez, I am very often deeply moved. I think that part of it is that he just sings while playing some soft basic chords with an acoustic guitar, letting the lyrics carry the whole weight. But for whatever reason it is, I am emotionally affected every time I listen to Paco Ibáñez singing Tus ojos me recuerdan, Un español habla de su tierra, A galopar, Mi niña se fue a la mar, El rey Almutamid, Me gusta cuando callas, Andaluces de Jaén, Como tú, etc. Since I often think of the being, I am especially stirred by Palabras para Julia.

When I listen to Paco Ibáñez, I often think that Spanish—the ability to appreciate the beauty of those poems, the ability to get tears when one listens to Coplas por la muerte de su padre—is actually the best present my daughter will ever have gotten from me. In her eyes, it might not yet compare with a Liverpool shirt, but it is something that not all the AI in the world can give.