Yet for all the authentic gains achieved in translation over the past several years, do not count on your phone, smart speaker, PC or ear device breaking down all the language barriers any time soon. In this always-on, connected world, the need to understand one another is arguably more important than ever.

Half of the internet’s content is in English, says Google AI director of product Barak Turovsky, but only 20 per cent of the global population has any English skills. And while Microsoft’s text translation technology now supports up to 70 languages and its speech translation can decipher around 40, says Microsoft technical fellow and chief technology officer of AI services, Xuedong Huang, that is a mere fraction of the 7,000 languages spoken today.

Meanwhile, more than half of the 2.5 billion people on Facebook post in a language other than English. Facebook employs artificial intelligence on the social network itself, as well as on Messenger and Instagram, resulting in more than six billion translations a day.

For high-stakes political, legal, financial and health-related exchanges, however, AI-fused machine translation methods cannot possibly substitute for skilled human interpreters and translators – although some of these rely on machines at times, too.

This reliance on human translators means big business. Florian Faes, managing director of Slator, a Swiss-based provider of news and analysis on the global language industry, estimates the business-to-business segment of translation to be a US$23 billion annual market.

“When a big pharmaceutical company needs to run a clinical trial, they need supporting documentation in 10 languages; or when a bank wants to publish equity research to Japanese institutional investors, they get it translated by a B2B translation firm,” he says.

For casual or occasional use – spending time with distant kin or a foreign exchange student, say – near-real-time translation is good and getting better, even if results are often frustrating.

Google’s Interpreter Mode can handle real-time translation on your phone across 44 languages. You can start by saying something along the lines of “Hey Google, help me speak Thai.”

In some instances, the Assistant will suggest Smart Replies, to let you quickly respond without speaking.

The Google Translate app has more than one billion active monthly users, 95 per cent from outside the US; more than 140 billion words are translated daily.

The company plans to launch a live-transcription feature in the next few months that promises to effectively turn your Android phone into a real-time translator device for long-form speech.

For its part, Microsoft translation capabilities turn up across the product spectrum: PowerPoint, Edge, Outlook, Word, Skype, and on PCs, iOS and Android devices, even Kindle e-readers.

Two years ago, Microsoft researchers said they created the first machine translation system able to translate sentences of news articles from Chinese to English with the same quality and accuracy as a person.

That said, language faux pas persist, and they range from downright embarrassing to potentially dangerous.

“We have taken steps to ensure it doesn’t happen again. We sincerely apologise for the offence this has caused,” a Facebook spokesman said.

Last year, researchers at the University of California-San Francisco found that the machine learning algorithm Google rolled out in 2017 was 92 per cent accurate in translating doctors’ orders from English to Spanish and 81 per cent accurate translating them from English to Chinese. Only two per cent of the errors in Spanish and 8 per cent of those in Chinese were deemed to have the potential to cause “clinically significant harm”.

“Great if I’m in the 92 per cent, not so great if I’m in the 8 per cent as a patient who is being communicated something exactly the opposite of what the doctor [wanted to tell me],” says Jost Zetzsche, a spokesman at the American Translators Association and co-author of Found In Translation: How Language Shapes our Lives and Transforms The World.

Translation works best in controlled environments, or where there’s a lot of data training the models.

A big breakthrough came in 2016 with the use of deep “neural network” technology that allowed machines to understand the context of an entire sentence, improving fluency. Earlier systems were limited because they had to break sentences up into chunks, disconnecting intent and meaning from the actual words.

Those sci-fi Babel fish translators – or something like them – may yet find their way to our real-world ears sooner than we think.

This April, Waverly Labs plans to ship an over-the-ear US$199 interpreter device called Ambassador, which supports 20 languages and 42 dialects. It follows an earlier Waverly language translation product called Pilot Smart Earbuds and Google’s Pixel Buds, which work in conjunction with the latest Google Translate app on an Android phone with the Google Assistant.

Ambassador uses a set of microphones to capture speech and actively listen for someone speaking in a selected language within a range of about 8 feet (2.5 metres). In this “listen mode”, you’ll hear an audible translation and can also read the words in a companion app.

In “converse mode”, up to four people wearing Ambassadors in their ears can engage in what the company claims will be a fluid conversation.

And there’s “lecture mode” in which Ambassador will broadcast the words of a speaker wearing the device to multiple people in a hall by streaming audio translations to the lecturer’s smartphone, which can then be played over a loudspeaker.

Could these advances spell the beginning of the end for human translators? It’s possible, the American Translators Association’s Zetzsche tells fellow translators – but way in the future.

“But at that point, everyone has been replaced,” he says, including doctors and lawyers.