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An interesting look at constructed languages, and why/how some were created for TV and movies:
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This is making me wish for translators who just offer various forms of the same words or phrases during speeches like the State of the Union:
Then they could wrap things up with a call to action:
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Interesting. Maybe it’s because I started code-switching as a child, but I’ve never had a “foreign” accent mess with my usual spoken American accents. 
The same was true while performing roles in various school plays/musicals or singing songs in various languages/styles of famous artists. I was either in character or not. When speaking other languages I might accidentally mix words between them, but the accent remains in place depending on the language I’m speaking.
For example, if I’m speaking Spanish, I might accidentally say a word in French. My accent switches from what I use in Spanish to French when the French word comes out of my mouth. It doesn’t come out in my Spanish accent. The worst case scenario is that it goes further than one word and my sentence has turned into French. At that point, I’m thinking in French so I struggle to get back to Spanish (or sometimes, even English).
Thinking about what he said, I realized my inner voice definitely has multiple vocal tracks. Fortunately, they only play one at a time. 
I’m not sure how many non-vocal background processes might be running during a conversation, though. Vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation are just the tip of the iceberg.
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I was bit confused by that headline. Weirdly in Greenlandic and Finnish the word for democrats is written identically.
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The alien is asking whether he can pay with travelers checks. The Starfleet pilot respondss with “Limerick, Dublin”
How silly
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Doing some browsing before i get back into work mode. I see an article on Polygon titled Bring back the 2000s-era sci-fi flopbuster, i’m amused at the word play. I switch browser tabs and i’m staring at Elsewhere Cafe. A single clear word floats into my mind…
Flopulence (cue pretentious perfume commercial)
I chuckle at the absurdity of the word, and also make a note to myself to use it sometime soon.
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So I was looking at this post on my phone
and, as I usually do, I watched the video in an incognito tab so it doesn’t fuck up my algorithm.
This time this Mark Rober video played completely dubbed into German, obviously by AI technology (although pretty convincingly, annoying cheerful YouTuber voice and all!).
I hate this sort of thing, so I went to turn it off in the video menu: there is absolutely no way to do so. YouTube apparently forces you to watch videos in your system language, at least when you’re not logged in! This is horrible.
I think one of the aspects of the “AI revolution” we haven’t talked about a lot is that this will mean multilingualism in the world’s youth will atrophy. The reason the Scandinavian countries were for a long time much better than the bigger European countries at speaking English was that their markets were too small for dubbing and for local productions to be worth it, so children grew up hearing (subtitled) English. This has changed with the streaming and YouTube revolutions, and levels of competency are levelling out across the continent. I fear that this sort of AI “assistive” technology will make us all into linguistic islands again.
I was surprised by the video in Portuguese. For a moment I thought it was a cut from an episode of a Discovery Channel show.
I speak English poorly, without any fluency and with a vocabulary equivalent to that of a 5-year-old child. I confess that out of insecurity and laziness I even use an online translator.more than Id should. But I recognize that this hinders my ability to write properly.
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Yeah, this sort of thing doesn’t solve your problem, if anything, it makes it worse. Obviously, they are working towards a future where we don’t need to know another language. You would be writing this in Portuguese, and I in German, and if we met, we would have our phones as a universal real-time translator. It wouldn’t even go via English anymore, there wouldn’t be any “authoritative version” of a forum like this, everyone would just write in whatever language, and every user would see a version in their own language.
But we have to ask ourselves if that is something we actually want. I enjoy learning and knowing different languages. It adds to brain plasticity. I really fear that once we don’t have to express ourselves in foreign languages anymore, we just slip into a vegetative state. Especially, if all our other communication work (such as composing longer texts) is taken over by generative AI, which will also summarise anything that’s too long or complicated to read.
Not to mention that no translation is ever perfect. Not even the best AI system can translate all the nuances of the original, because not even the best human translator can. Something is always lost in translation. Why would I want that when I’m perfectly capable of watching the original?
Of course, what we want doesn’t matter anymore. YouTube just dibs a video without the option of turning it off. We get what tech companies say we get. And they want this future.
I googled to see whether others had the same problem (of course they do!) and this Reddit comment by /u/drArsMoriendin says it all:
I legitimately think that youtube as an american company doesn’t understand multilingualism. It’s kinda racist. I voted with my wallet and cancelled premium over its language settings, which feels insane to say