Author: paige laevy

A 2017 tale, akin to a cautionary tale, continues to circulate among linguists and AI researchers. In the West Bank, a Palestinian man wrote “good morning” in Arabic on Facebook. According to Facebook’s AI, it means “attack them.” He was taken into custody. When the mistranslation was eventually discovered, the harm had already materialized in a very tangible and physical manner. This type of mistake raises questions about how much faith we should have in systems that don’t truly comprehend what they’re reading. Since then, AI translation has significantly improved. Exchanges at the tourist level are handled with remarkable fluency…

LG has quietly entered one of the most contentious areas of technology, which is surprising for a company that most people still associate with OLED televisions and refrigerators. The 7.8-billion-parameter language model EXAONE 3.0, which was made available as open weights on Hugging Face in August 2024, did not come with the fanfare of a Meta launch or the breathless hype cycle that surrounds anything OpenAI works on. It appeared almost modestly, was made available for research and educational use on an open-source platform, and then began to surpass expectations. Bilingual fluency—not just mediocre performance in two languages, but actual…

London is the undisputed global center of curated exclusivity, with about 130 private members’ clubs as of the last count. This number still dwarfs New York’s fifty or so offerings. On a calm Tuesday, you can practically feel the centuries’ worth of political horse-trading, gossip, and trade seeping through Georgian brickwork as you stroll down St. James’s Street. However, over the past ten years, there has been a less obvious change within these organizations as well as within their more recent, glitzy competitors. The rolls of members are evolving. Not only in gender and generation, which have been thoroughly documented,…

Russian is spoken more casually than most Londoners would ever imagine in a section of West London, roughly between Notting Hill Gate and the southern edge of Kensington. Not in any overtly dramatic manner. Not with signs or flags. However, in the quiet conversations between mothers during pickup, in the homework folders hidden in kids’ backpacks, and in the Saturday morning hallways of supplemental schools that have been in operation for more than 20 years. Sitting quietly next to some of the richest postcodes on the planet, this bilingual community receives very little attention from the outside world. The Russian…

Staging Romeo and Juliet once more in a world full of Shakespearean revivals seems almost reckless. The play has been performed on roller skates, in swimming pools, and in leather jackets. Therefore, the initial reaction might have been courteous skepticism when Theatr Cymru announced a Welsh-English bilingual production that would open at Shakespeare’s Globe in November 2025. Perhaps another trick. The same old tragedy was covered with yet another deft framing technique. However, Romeo a Juliet proved to be more difficult to ignore. Unlike any previous event held at the Globe’s candlelit Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, it was eerie and poignant.…

A twenty-year-old in Ghent has picked up enough Japanese to read manga panels without translation, learned conversational Korean from drama subtitles, and is currently studying Turkish grammar on her way to work every morning. She was not bilingual as a child. Her parents speak a little halting English and Flemish Dutch. Perhaps the most intriguing aspect is that she is not unique among her peers. The way that young people interact with foreign languages has changed. Generally speaking, Gen Z—those born between the late 1990s and the early 2010s—seems to be picking up languages more quickly and casually than their…

Between the ticket barrier and the platform edge, there is a point at which language begins to shift. Not dramatically; no one abruptly starts speaking in tongues or changes their accent mid-step. However, something changes. Millions of people simultaneously hear the voice narrating the Jubilee line at seven forty-five in the morning, even though it belongs to no one in particular. Two words: “Mind the gap.” A directive disguised as politeness. And for some reason, over the course of decades, those two words came to represent the unofficial motto of a city that would prefer not to communicate with you…

There is a certain type of outrage that only needs a picture and no facts. A cropped photo of London’s Whitechapel Station with Bengali script underneath the station name started making the rounds on X in late 2025. With foreign characters on a London Underground sign and no English visible, the image appeared frightening if you wanted it to. It was a visual representation of all the preconceived notions that a particular audience had about immigration and cultural deterioration. Naturally, the issue was that the picture had been purposefully framed. Anyone who has passed the station or looked at Google…

When you pay close attention to bilingual Londoners, something strange happens. A teenager from Tower Hamlets who speaks Bengali switches between Sylheti and English with ease, but her English has a glottal stop and a distinctly East London vowel shape. Her grandmother, who immigrated decades ago, also speaks English, albeit haltingly and with every syllable laced with Bengali prosody. The two languages are the same, but the accents are completely different. The distinction goes beyond cultural differences. It’s neural. Accents are a decorative afterthought of language, but neuroscience has only lately started to treat them as a legitimate subject of…

After completing his doctorate at the University of Tokyo, Tatsuya Amano shares a story about attending his first international scientific conference. Even after carrying textbooks around campus for years and studying English since seventh grade, he still found himself standing at a coffee break unable to follow half of the conversations going on around him. 2006 was that year. A researcher in his position might simply open an app almost twenty years later. AI systems and human translators have been getting closer for years, but something changed sometime in 2024 or 2025. The deep-learning architecture of neural machine translation, which…