Computers can translate all kinds of languages well. Do our children need to learn more languages in the future?

Computers have always been pulling the rabbit out of the hat now and then with the rigorous progress on the technological front. Though the benefits of languages being translated is surplus, children don’t get benefited entirely from this process. The main reason being,translating and learning is never the same. A computer just puts the cake on the table, but never feeds it. Communication brings people all over the world together. So kids these days have the upper hand when they learn more than two languages. Learning a new language could ease the limitations on cultural variations. They could get a wider knowledge about one’s culture and lifestyle when they get hooked to their language.  For example, One needs to know more than one language to work anywhere in India.

Career perspective:

A computer just translates some words into the specified language but it doesn’t teach a kid how to be well versed in that particular language. Apart from all the cultural excuses, a kid needs to learn more languages if it’s going to fetch a greater career benefit in the near future. “In our increasingly global world, parents realize that their kids will benefit from knowing more than one language,” says Nancy Rhodes, director of foreign-language education at the Center for Applied Linguistics, in Washington, D.C.   So kids need to learn more languages these days to outshine others in today’s survival test professionally. CAPLAN(2014) feels If people are going to get some basic career benefit out of it, or it enriches their personal life, then foreign language study is great.  And he also feels if the kid has no career benefit from a language, then there is no point in learning it. He claims of it as an added burden. Studies have even proved that multilinguals have enhanced memory and multi-tasking abilities.

Limitations on Translation:

Computer translation can never be considered accurate. One or two words or a sentence may be translated in a proper way. For example, Korean and some languages use a different sentence structure and the computer doesn’t translate it aptly. So if one understands a language and learns it from scratch, there is a higher probability that the person might even survive some crucial test scare on the job front.

Last of all, just translation is never going to serve their purpose if that particular language is a prime decider of their professional competitors. And in today’s scenario,kids learning more than one language could end up on the fertile side of the job arena. So kids need to learn more languages to strive well.