Catch the Babylon Fish. The Human Brain, Neural Networks, and Learning Foreign Languages

Will we have a Babylon fish in the near future – a device for automatic translation from foreign languages? Some will say that technology has already reached a high enough level and will soon replace humans. Others will insist that computers will never be able to translate literary works qualitatively or ‘synchronize’ at conferences. In this book, we will not only try to answer the question of the 'Babylon fish', but also talk about what language is and where it is 'stored' in the brain, how learning foreign languages contributes to our healthy aging, and how the translator's brain works. We will also give the floor to scientists who will tell us how to learn languages most effectively; to translators, who will share their views on the future of their profession; and to machine translation system developers, who will reveal their plans for conquering the translation world.