Following Argentina’s controversial come-from-behind World Cup victory against Egypt, a match the losing team said was “fixed,” one wit on social media summed up the mood.
“Not even the British Museum stole so much from Egypt as FIFA did,” user Intrapiernoso said in a tweet seen by over 6 million people. It was arguably the best zinger of a tournament that has had dozens of them.
Except the original was not in English. What they actually wrote was, “Ni el Museo Britanico le robo tanto a Egipto, como la FIFA.” I do not speak Spanish and while it does not take a genius to work out what “el Museo Britanico” means, the act of puzzling over the unfamiliar grammar robs the remark of its wit.
Illustration: Constance Chou
But now, thanks to the automated, LLM-generated translations and algorithmic boosts of social media, I can read it in my native language. It has also been shared by users speaking Persian, Arabic and Korean, for whom el Museo Britanico might be harder to grasp.
The World Cup happens once every four years, and each time it is a stark demonstration of how technology has changed. During the 2006 tournament, I got into podcasts; in 2022, I watched the games anywhere on my iPad, free of my TV.
This is the first time I get to see what people in other cultures are saying about soccer, in their own words, removing the language barrier and democratizing the conversation — and revealing the wit of multiple cultures, from French swipes at Argentina to the Brazilian narrative that blames their side’s recent underperformance on the decline of Catholicism.
It also shows how much we have in common: The most bitter rivalries are everywhere due to historical grudges with our closest neighbors, while Simpsons football memes seem to transcend national borders. There is also a serious side: French star Kylian Mbappe’s riposte to a Paraguayan senator who attacked him in racist tweets was written in French, but still one of the most seen remarks of the entire tournament, with 90 million views.
It is not unreasonable to be wary of where artificial intelligence is taking us? However, it is also humbling to think that we are close to solving the problem of language, an issue that has divided humanity for as long as our species has existed.
The creation myth in the Book of Genesis says that after the flood, “the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.” The united human race, goes the tale, sought to build a tower in Babel that would reach all the way to heaven. For this hubris, God punished them, “confounding” their tongues and scattering humanity across the face of the earth. It is an origin tale to explain why members of the same race should find themselves unable to communicate with one another.
However, now we can understand each other at scale almost instantly, without committing to decades of language learning. Far beyond tweets, this technology will allow information to be free, removing gatekeepers and allowing ordinary people to access the latest academic papers, and weaken Anglophone domination of global discourse.
Similar leaps are coming for voice, humanity’s primary form of communication. In the coming years, technology like Apple Inc’s AirPods live translation will combine with tech like the latest voice mode of ChatGPT, which can speak in a manner that feels like a human being, to provide something close to Star Trek’s universal translator.
Of course, it is far from an unequivocal good. Like any muscle, speaking a second language is a skill that atrophies if it is not used (for now, X gives you the options to say which languages it should not interpret, but as this technology proliferates such technology will likely default to your native tongue more and more). LLMs can be far from perfect, particularly in cultures like Japanese where the subject or object of a sentence is frequently dropped and assumed from context. X’s Grok, for now, confidently translates regardless, while a human might express some uncertainty.
Just because we comprehend each other’s words, it does not automatically follow that we share a common understanding. Translation of text cannot always explain irony, taboo, banter or trolling.
There is no better time to recognize that than during the World Cup, as Americans and British, “two nations divided by a common language” as the line often attributed to George Bernard Shaw has it, talk past one another over the same sport.
No amount of linguistic proficiency can change the fact that lots of Americans seemingly believe that if LeBron James or Tom Brady just took up soccer instead, they would win the tournament.
Perhaps the biggest worry is this: Some modern scholars argue that the scattering of humanity in the Tower of Babel story was not a punishment but a blessing, bestowing on us cultural diversity and dispersing a monolithic empire. As the internet has proliferated, the world has become smaller, squashed into a monoculture. That might happen with our wit, too, as local differences, particularly smaller ones, give way to the largest languages and the references that travel most easily.
AI translation may blur some of that. But still, after thousands of years of failing to understand one another, getting the joke at all still feels something close to miraculous.
Gearoid Reidy is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Japan and the Koreas. He previously led the breaking news team in North Asia, and was the Tokyo deputy bureau chief. This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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