[cyphar]

Aside from the fact that being able to generalise a model with very little training data is an important AI research problem to solve, language death is a serious concern and is being accelerated due to the fact that many languages are not supported at all by modern technology (leading to "prestige language" pressures that are a known cause of historical language death).

For instance, Icelandic is not supported by any modern smartphone platform which has lead to Icelandic natives communicating with each other in English and very little information is translated to Icelandic[1,2].

That being said, I am worried that having translations that are "too good" could also act to accelerate language death as the importance of keeping languages alive will seem less significant (to non-language-nerds) if we can translate works written in that language to any other language with very small datasets. Luckily I'm not convinced that AI models will be able to produce convincing and consistent translations for a long time -- languages are so different in so many ways that I can't see how adding more dimensions and parameters to a model would account for them.

[1]: https://youtu.be/qYlmFfsyLMo?t=141 [2]: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/22/world/europe/iceland-icel...