If you are planning a journey by car it doesn't take much effort to study a route map, but some effort is involved. However very little compared to learning Esperanto to a practically useful level.

But look at the tremendous growth in the sales of GPS navigation devices. People are willing to spend hundreds of pounds (far more than the cost of a map) to avoid that tiny effort required in studying a map to memorise a route.

What does this tell us about the future of Esperanto as a solution to the language problem?

It strongly suggests that people will be prepared to shell out a fair amount of money to purchase portable translators when they come to market rather than to put in the effort involved in foreign language learning, even if that effort is in the case of Esperanto relatively minimal.

Hm, I think you are overgeneralising.

If you were supposed to memorise many routes with the length of the route from Madrid to Rom, I guess it would take much more effort to memorize those routes than learning Esperanto to a practically useful level.

Also, studying something takes a lot of time and it is not for free either, you pay it with your life time. So you have to find a compromise between lifetime, money and your personal advantages.

If I often travel to many different places, it probably would be cheaper to buy a navigation device than memorizing all those routes, which I probably just drive once in my life.

But if I just have to memorize the way to my new job, which I will drive every day, I would never consider to buy a navigation device, but I just would have a look at a map.
And if this new job brings out new opportunities for broadening my horizons - as Esperanto does - I would even study alternative routes or consider moving closer to that new job.

I tend to say, though, you can't compare those two points. I guess there are more advantages in learning Esperanto than in memorizing a random route.

sudanglo:What does this tell us about the future of Esperanto as a solution to the language problem?

It tells us that it is important to weigh the benefits and the effort of doing something.
Of course, there are advantages and disadvantages of learning Esperanto. I guess the biggest disadvantage of Esperanto is the small number of speakers. But in return you get access to people around the world.
Unfortunately the human is a creature of habit. We just change our behaviour if there is no other way. So as long there are other ways for "solving" the language problem - which actually are just workarounds - people won't use Esperanto instead.

As for me, I decided for learning Esperanto instead of improving my English language skills because I know I will never reach the level of an native speaker in a reasonable amount of time, which is more likely to reach in Esperanto.

Interesting comparison. It's also an issue of quantity versus quality.

I am a map-person myself. I only recently bought a GPS unit for a trip to England, because I was going to be driving in the UK for the first time, and I thought the GPS would help me navigate the small country roads between the motorway and some of my smaller destinations.

I think that map plus GPS is the best combination. The GPS frequently tried to shave two minutes off my trip by taking me on some weird route, when it was simpler and easier to take a motorway; even when I have a GPS, I normally plan a route using a map, and then force the GPS to take me on the route that I've picked, rather than simply punching in my destination and letting it take me on some strange route. GPS units tend not to work well in cities, they tend to want to take you straight through a city, full of traffic lights and traffic, rather than taking you on a slightly longer route on faster roads around the city. Even a "prefer highways" setting doesn't always help with this.

To bring this back to languages - I use a map (Esperanto) for my detailed interactions. But sometimes I just want a quick and dirty translation for a language I have no chance of using, and then an automatic translator is useful. And sometimes, like the hybrid map/GPS thing, I use an automatic translator to translate a text for a language I speak slightly but not well, and then I go through and modify the translation with words I prefer to use. We would be foolish to ignore the benefits of technology but we would also be foolish to rely completely on the technology, to the exclusion of all else (akin to not knowing how to read a map - I have occasionally met adults incapable of reading maps, and I was astonished to find this to be the case, and these weren't even people who would have had GPS growing up)

I think it may be a bit like comparing apples and oranges. Sure, they are each round and a fruit, but the similarities taper off there. I feel the largest issue is that maps and navigation are both things that computers can do very well. The weakest link is in fact the human interface, because voice recognition is just very hard to do (especially with street names and many destinations). That being said, I am terrible with directions and would be frequently lost (even in my home town) without my GPS. Although I do prefer a more map-like view of my destination and current location, and maps are necessary (for me) if I plan on going somewhere with no cell data coverage.

Considering that the human interface is 90% of a translator I doubt that they will so readily be accepted. I can only imagine the problems caused by people with zero knowledge of languages using such a device (much like the gps users who cannot read maps). I think that a study of language along with automatic translation is going to be necessary (at least until the computers can think for themselves, but then we'll have to pay them...).

If I think about how I might use such a device, I don't really see it being all-too enjoyable an experience. I would use it in the airport to help read signs, tell the cab triver where to go, order a cup of earl grey, etc., but I don't see myself eating lunch with a friend/acquaintance and having an enjoyable conversation with it. Those functions which would be truly useful are already easily performed by Google translate on your nearest smartphone. Those functions are also not the intended purpose of Esperanto, so I don't think it will have an impact on Esperanto's future as a solution to the language issue.

On a related topic, I believe there is a small but growing group of people who notice their discontent with the instant-gratification consumeristic mentality. I take great enjoyment in writing (and writing in cursive), using a fountain pen, drinking loose-leaf tea, preparing my own food, and in learning esperanto. Just my 2 cents.

Let's say I want to communicate with someone in Bali. I write my letter, put it into the English-->Balinese translator, and get a big block of incomprehensible (to me) text back.

I don't speak Balinese. How do I know that the translation is actually what I meant to say? Am I supposed to just trust the programmers? Hah. No matter how good people say a machine translator is, there will always be times that it doesn't pick up the subtleties and nuances of the source language, where it doesn't understand an idiom I might have used, or etc. It might be literally translating something that definitely should NOT be literally translated because a literal translation makes no sense (or is insulting, or embarrassing or...). The idea of "translate the ideas, not the words" is much tougher to get a machine to do, and will likely remain so until we get more advanced AI than we're even close to at the moment.

Since I won't have the slightest idea if the translation I'm sending is either a model of eloquence or incomprehensible garbage*, I will be taking a chance every time I use it.

When I speak Esperanto, on the other hand, I know exactly what I'm saying. Every time. (At least, that's my story.)

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* Or, more likely, some misleading area in-between. It's kinda what you said, but it's been reworded by the robot. So when someone comes back at you with a "But you said x, y, or z", and you most certainly did not say x, y or anything close to z, but the robot had to change what you said to meet grammatical or syntactical requirements, or had to interpret an idiom that doesn't exist in the target language, or so on, that's when the fun begins; what they received (z!) really isn't what you sent (c?), except that it is (z!). This can be very serious if you're talking about something where precision is important and makes a huge financial or legal difference. This is not a problem for Esperanto speakers. When I say "Mi loĝas en blua domo", I know I won't have to field questions about why my house is sad.

RiotNrrd:Let's say I want to communicate with someone in Bali. I write my letter, put it into the English-->Balinese translator, and get a big block of incomprehensible (to me) text back.

I don't speak Balinese. How do I know that the translation is actually what I meant to say? Am I supposed to just trust the programmers? Hah. No matter how good people say a machine translator is, there will always be times that it doesn't pick up the subtleties and nuances of the source language, where it doesn't understand an idiom I might have used, or etc. It might be literally translating something that definitely should NOT be literally translated because a literal translation makes no sense (or is insulting, or embarrassing or...). The idea of "translate the ideas, not the words" is much tougher to get a machine to do, and will likely remain so until we get more advanced AI than we're even close to at the moment.

Since I won't have the slightest idea if the translation I'm sending is either a model of eloquence or incomprehensible garbage, I will be taking a chance every time I use it.

When I speak Esperanto, on the other hand, I know exactly what I'm saying. Every time. (At least, that's my story.)

Yes, it is true. I had the bad days when I used the google traslator to tell a Loa to learn Esperanto. Without knowing the google translator set English as an international language in most languages (whether this is a bias ?) I keyed in: Please learn Esperanto, the international language. It turned out to be Please learn English, the international language and again, Esperanto is also translated into English in many languages.

Without knowing the error, I kept discussing the good and simple learning of Esperanto till he wrote in broken English, that why I suggested to him to learn English and in fact, he is learning it now.

That's the thing. Even for a really good machine translator, close isn't really good enough. It has to be right at least as often as a person would be, which, for your typical day-to-day sort of stuff, is pretty close to 100%.

But if it isn't? You won't know! That's the awful thing about it. The only way you could know it wasn't making a horrible, boneheaded, embarrassing mistake somewhere is if you could speak the language and check the output. If you could do that, you wouldn't need the translator. But since you don't, and therefore can't, you just have to trust it. And if it's really, really, lifechangingly important? You just have to trust it.

Yeah. That seems like a really good plan.

When we both use Esperanto, we know what we're saying. We can check the output. If we say something idiotic, it's because we're idiots; it's not just because a machine is making us sound that way. Which, OK, that means there isn't something to blame it on, I guess, so I suppose that's an upside to the machine. Still. It doesn't seem all that up, overall.

I just tested Google Translate's translations of "the buck stops here" ...

to Spanish: la responsabilidad es mía (perfect. full marks)

to Esperanto: la cervo haltas tie (ho ve)

Machine translation already shows considerable intelligence. Look at the results from GT for these sentences translated into French

I like coffee
time flies like an arrow
fruit flies don't live very long

J'aime le café
Le temps file comme une flèche
les mouches des fruits ne vivent pas très longtemps

Examples like the 3 English sentences above are often quoted to show how machine translation 'can't work'.

But the current level of development is not the point. Where will we be in 10 years time?

The point is that given a choice between spending money to solve a problem and making some intellectual effort, many people will choose the former.

I see no sign that the Esperanto movement is taking seriously the near-future advances in this field.

The whole current propaganda for Esperanto pivots on the ease of learning Esperanto compared to national languages. But it is even easier to buy a hand held automatic translator.

Incidentally the future sales of such devices will be a measure of how real the public perceive 'the language problem' to be.

sudanglo:Machine translation already shows considerable intelligence. Look at the results from GT for these sentences translated into French

I like coffee
time flies like an arrow
fruit flies don't live very long

J'aime le café
Le temps file comme une flèche
les mouches des fruits ne vivent pas très longtemps

Examples like the 3 English sentences above are often quoted to show how machine translation 'can't work'.

But the current level of development is not the point. Where will we be in 10 years time?

The point is that given a choice between spending money to solve a problem and making some intellectual effort, many people will choose the former.

I see no sign that the Esperanto movement is taking seriously the near-future advances in this field.

The whole current propaganda for Esperanto pivots on the ease of learning Esperanto compared to national languages. But it is even easier to buy a hand held automatic translator.

Incidentally the future sales of such devices will be a measure of how real the public perceive 'the language problem' to be.

I didn't read the messages, but I have to jump in and say that English-French is probably the BEST functioning language pair!! Google Translate is very useful reading French news, but try, say, Chinese or Finnish (and to non-English language)!