Machine Translation of Human Languages in the Age of LLMs: Is This the End of the Language Barrier?

In his contribution to the workshop on Decoding Communication in Nonhuman Species IV, Markus Freitag (Google) surveyed the rise of LLM-driven translation and its near-human performance in high-resource languages. He emphasized, however, that the “end of the language barrier” will require more than textual training data, especially for low-resource or nonhuman languages, arguing that multimodal data — for example, pairing sound with video or images — will be essential for real progress.