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> Google Translate (launched in 2006)

You know, Google has Orwellian-retconned the fact that Translate was available in 2004 (based on my memory and Internet Archive), no idea why. I remember using it in December 2004 to translate winhistory.de.

> “The poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.”

This Douglas Adams quote could also apply to the internet writ large

Can you elaborate on your position? To me the opposite is far more obvious: the Internet has enabled people from all over the world to meet, learn from each other, become friends. "The Russians/Chinese/whatever" are no longer just a faceless group of people who are trying to take over the world - they're the person you worked with a few years ago, the friend you've played games with for years, the open source developer you've been collaborating with.
Soniox offers real-time speech-to-text with real-time translation between 60+ languages (mostly to/from English with some additional pairs between more popular languages). It operates with minimal amount of context and produces the translated text as soon as possible.

https://soniox.com/

Disclaimer: I used to work for Soniox

nuances like idioms can and will be solved. wispr flow is already solving a lot of these things via their speech-to-text interface.

as better models are introduced, figurative language, implication, cultural nuancec etc. becomes easier to reconcile.