IELTS CAM Inspired 19 - Reading Test 3 with Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
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IELTS CAM Inspired 19 - Reading Test 3 With Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 1
Question 1 - 7
Do the following statements agree with the information given in the Reading Passage?
TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this
1
No archaeologist had examined Tavu before Lindqvist and her team arrived.
2
The people of Denu assisted with the dig in the hope of finding out about their own ancestors.
3
The axes that Denu's islanders made from shell had no known match of similar age anywhere else in the region.
4
Sela already existed as an island in its own right 18,000 years ago.
5
In the team's view, the change to axes of flint was bound up with the climate turning warmer and wetter.
6
The animal remains proved more revealing about the islanders' diet than the researchers had expected.
7
For a span of several thousand years, no trace of any human use of the Denu shelters survives.
Question 8 - 13
Complete the notes below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
Archaeological findings on Tavu
The rock shelters, set within two
8.
close to the village of Denu, held:
• axes roughly 14,000 years old, thought to have helped in building canoes
• axes made from
9.
, dating from about 11,700 years ago
• an animal's
10.
, showing what the early inhabitants ate
• proof that the islanders travelled to other islands:
– obsidian: a material with no natural source on Tavu
–
11.
resembling ones found on neighbouring islands
From roughly 8,000 years ago, the people of Tavu are thought to have:
• possibly abandoned hunting in favour of fishing
• held
12.
along with objects made of metal
• probably taken part in the growing and selling of
13.
.
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 2
Question 14 - 17
Reading Passage 2 has eight paragraphs, A-H.
Which paragraph contains the following information?
Write the correct letter, A-H.
14
the claim that the harms which are hardest to see may do the greatest damage
15
a mention of wetlands defending coastlines against severe weather
16
an estimate of how much of the world’s carbon output comes from draining peatland
17
an account of the way tree-felling draws water out of peatland
Question 18 - 22
Complete the sentences below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
18
Stripping the tree cover from peatland makes it more likely that
will break out, releasing large quantities of CO₂.
19
The peatland woodlands now being cleared for plantations are home to an exceptional range of
.
20
So that boats can reach the swamp, the logging companies cut
, which then let the water drain away.
21
When microbes break down the carbon in the drained peat, they give off carbon dioxide as well as
.
22
Because peat is made up almost entirely of
, the slow sinking of the drained solid matter — known as subsidence — can in time leave land beneath the sea.
Question 23 - 26
Match each statement with the correct expert, A-D.
List of Findings
A
Lorenzo Brandt
B
Cormac Halloran
C
Joran Mikkelsen
D
Anneli Voss
23
Local people ought to have a say in decisions about the future of wetland areas.
24
National approaches to wetlands are not the same from one country to another.
25
Wetlands are usually harmed by people who had no intention of doing so.
26
Undoing damage to the environment can be a relatively simple business.
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 3
Question 27 - 30
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write the correct letter in boxes on your answer sheet.
27
What do we learn about the conversation described in the opening paragraph?
A
The two people are speaking to each other in separate languages.
B
Each of them finds certain parts of the exchange hard going.
C
Both of them are in surroundings that are unfamiliar to them.
D
The subject they are discussing is hard for each of them to grasp.
28
What helps the electronic translator to work during lectures at the Bergen Institute of Speech Technology?
A
the students' ability to read at speed
B
the specific languages that are involved
C
the technical competence of the teaching staff
D
the fact that each year's lecture covers much the same ground
29
In referring to The Lantern-Bearers of Vega, the writer suggests that
A
the emergence of speech-translating technology came as little surprise.
B
the creature in the story was regarded as something people had no wish for.
C
the novel was not making a genuine attempt to forecast future events.
D
certain methods of translation work better than others.
30
What point does the writer make about sharing earpieces?
A
People will in time grow accustomed to doing it.
B
Before long the equipment will no longer be needed at all.
C
It is easy to understand why people are unwilling to do so.
D
It is not something that many people have any cause to worry about.
Question 31 - 34
Complete each sentence with the correct ending, A-F, below.
List of Endings
A
since the rendering of speech happens without any delay.
B
though there is still a great deal left to achieve.
C
and show sensitivity towards polite behaviour.
D
although this gives rise to certain concerns.
E
because the devices need not conform to any standard conventions.
F
even though difficulties with background sound remain.
Approaches to speech translation are advancing quickly in South Korea
31
Television interviews that rely on voiceover translation work well
32
Translation systems of the future ought to speak to people suitably
33
People may be able to hold on to the customs of their own region
34
Question 35 - 40
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage?
YES if the statement agrees with the information
NO if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this
35
Even after the technology becomes highly sophisticated, knowing languages well will still be an advantage.
36
The value of these devices to people's domestic lives has by now been clearly proven.
37
The technology may help relatives who no longer share a language after moving to a new country.
38
Scientists are at present working to improve the visual side of translation.
39
In earlier centuries, scientists had no shared means of communication among themselves.
40
Most people would rather learn a foreign language than depend on translation software.
DOL IELTS Đình Lực
21/10/2026
📖 Bài đọc passage 1
Archaeologists discover evidence of prehistoric island settlers
Tavu is one of countless tropical islands strung across the eastern Indonesian archipelago, and until early 2020 no archaeologist had ever set foot on it. That changed when Dr Mira Lindqvist and a team from the University of Otago carried out the island's first excavations. Their finds point to a prehistoric people equally at home on land and sea — hunting in the thick rainforest, gathering food along the shore, and quite possibly sailing from one island to the next.
Behind the dig lay a larger question: how did the earliest humans travel out of mainland Asia, across the islands of Indonesia, and on into the now-vanished landmass that once joined Australia to New Guinea? Lindqvist's group had argued in earlier work that the northern route through the Wallacean islands — Tavu among them — would have been the easiest to travel, and that such islands very likely served as 'stepping stones' for the crossings made here thousands of years ago. What the theory lacked was firm evidence that anyone had actually lived in so remote a spot in deep antiquity, and it was the search for such early settlement sites that drew the team to Tavu.
A little inland from Denu, a village on Tavu's northern shore, the team came upon two limestone cliffs whose faces held prehistoric rock shelters worth digging. With permission and help from Denu's inhabitants, a small test pit was opened in each shelter. The digging yielded a wealth of artefacts, among them broken axe pieces, the oldest about 14,000 years old. Denu's earliest axes had been fashioned from shell, taken from clams. Such shell axes were nothing new to the region — comparable ones of much the same age had already turned up elsewhere, notably on Rua, an island just to the northeast. As on Rua, these Tavu axes were most probably used to build canoes, letting the early communities keep in touch with neighbours across the water.
The deepest cultural deposits at Denu pushed the record of human presence on Tavu back furthest — to roughly 18,000 years ago. The world was colder and drier then, so the rainforest that now feels almost impassable would have been far more open. With the sea about 120 metres below its present level, Tavu was much bigger too, taking in not only several small islets nearby but also Sela, which rising waters have since cut off as a separate island.
As the last ice age ended, about 11,700 years ago, temperatures and rainfall both climbed, and Tavu's jungle must have thickened as a result. The team sees no accident in the fact that the first flint axes — replacing the older shell ones — appear at just this point; the tougher tool was presumably a response to the harder work of clearing an ever-denser forest. Grinding flint into an axe head takes about twice as long as shell, yet flint keeps a sharp edge far longer.
The animal teeth recovered from the shelters point to the Tavu cuscus — a possum-like marsupial still found on the island — as the creature most often hunted by those living there. As the forest closed in, axes were probably used to open clearings where game could be caught more easily.
Among the Denu finds was obsidian, a glassy volcanic rock; since Tavu has no source of its own, it must have reached the island from elsewhere. Certain kinds of pendants appeared as well, of a type already known from islands further south in Wallacea. Once more the message is plain: Tavu's people regularly made journeys to other islands.
For some 10,000 years, the evidence suggests, the two Denu shelters housed a settled population — and then, about 8,000 years ago, both fell empty. Whether their occupants left Tavu entirely or resettled elsewhere on it is impossible to say. Perhaps the undergrowth had thickened until axes could no longer keep it in check; perhaps people simply moved to the coast and took up fishing instead of hunting.
Whatever drove them out, nothing suggests the Denu shelters were used again for a very long time — not until about 1,000 years ago, when fresh occupants arrived with ceramics and with objects worked in gold and silver. Given Tavu's position, this final chapter of settlement probably also tied the shelters to the far-reaching trade in sandalwood, a commodity grown across the region and carried to markets throughout the wider world.
A. A wetland is any stretch of land where water sits on the surface, or lies just beneath it, for all or part of the year. Ecologically these are intricate systems, home to plants and animals found nowhere else. Yet the Global Wetlands Alliance (GWA) reports that close to a third of the world’s wetlands have vanished since 1980, drained or built over for farmland, urban growth and the digging out of peat* and minerals. Many that remain have been degraded too – by run-off from farm chemicals, by factory waste, and by construction. * peat: a brown deposit formed by the partial decomposition of vegetation in wet acidic conditions, often cut out and dried for use as fuel
B
People have always settled near wetlands, and these fertile places have shaped human history; for countless communities they hold deep religious, historical and archaeological meaning. ‘The daily livelihoods and welfare of millions rest directly on wetlands,’ notes Dr Anneli Voss, senior hydrologist and lead researcher at the Freshwater Systems Institute (FSI). ‘Across much of the developing world, huge numbers of families depend on farming the wetlands to get by.’
C
Wetlands matter environmentally as well. ‘For softening the effects of a changing climate, wetlands are among our most valuable tools,’ says Joran Mikkelsen, who heads Coastal Resilience at the Global Wetlands Alliance. He points to how they shield low-lying coasts from rising seas and from violent weather – the storms, hurricanes and floods that batter such areas. Coastal wooded wetlands supply food and fresh water and blunt the force of storms, and several agencies, the GWA included, are now working to bring back the coastal forest that has been lost. ‘You can achieve a great deal just by putting a few trees in the ground on each hectare – enough shade to shift a whole microclimate,’ he says. ‘Making climate projects real is less about money than people assume.’
D
Awkwardly, the world’s wetlands also hold rich reserves of sought-after commodities – palm oil and pulpwood among them – and peatlands, whose soil is a waterlogged layer of part-rotted plant matter, are singled out above all. Drain a peatland for crops and it flips from a store of carbon into a source of emissions; on Lorenzo Brandt’s estimate, this single practice is behind close to a tenth of all the carbon humanity releases. Clearing the forest that grows on peat also makes destructive wildfires far more likely, and those pour enormous volumes of CO₂ into the air. ‘We are watching peat forests that shelter extraordinary wildlife disappear,’ says Brandt, head of Sustainable Land-use at the GWA, ‘sold off for a few decades of palm-oil earnings.’
E
The trouble begins the moment logging crews move in to fell the trees. They cut channels through the swamp so boats can get in and float the trunks back out along the same routes; these cuts then draw the water off the peatland, clearing the ground for corn, oil palms or pulpwood. With the water gone, bacteria and fungi attack the carbon locked in the peat, giving off carbon dioxide together with methane. The solid remainder, meanwhile, begins to sink – a slow settling known as subsidence – and since peat is around nine-tenths water, this ranks among the most worrying results of draining it. ‘In the tropics the surface drops by roughly three centimetres a year, so within fifty years vast areas of the Congo Basin and coastal New Guinea will sit below the water and flood,’ Brandt warns. ‘A disaster is being assembled; some regions stand to lose as much as a third of their land.’
F
These industries do their damage in ways easy enough to record, but Dr Cormac Halloran of the Global Nature Trust (GNT) argues that the quieter harms may prove far worse. ‘Silt washing off the land, and fertiliser with it, can be all but impossible to see,’ Halloran says. ‘Taking out more water than a system can spare is just as hard to notice. Now and then a dramatic headline appears – a river turning red, or catching light – but a wetland is rarely destroyed by one obvious blow.’ Even so, he blames no one for harming wetlands on purpose. ‘Two decades on this, and I’ve yet to meet a soul who set out to ruin a wetland,’ he says. ‘People almost never intend it; more often the harm is simply a side effect of earning a living.’
G
Brandt, too, accepts that people need to make a living. ‘Restoring the variety of life in a wetland is exactly what we want – but we can’t ignore that local communities have to earn something from it too.’ The FSI takes the same view. ‘In a developing country, people will look after a wetland only if it holds real value for them and pays its way,’ says Voss. ‘For this to last, local residents must share in the planning and the decisions, and hold clear rights to use the wetland.’
H
Wetlands would fare better, Brandt suggests, if more governments recognised their long-term worth. ‘Attitudes differ from one government to the next,’ he says, noting that while some nations now make wetland restoration a priority, others still deny there is any problem. Voss, though, allows herself a guarded hopefulness. ‘More and more, people are grasping how much wetlands matter,’ she says. ‘The degradation is still racing ahead, true, but my sense is that things are slowly starting to turn.’
Is the era of artificial speech translation upon us?
What used to belong only in science fiction—devices that let people converse across different languages—has finally arrived. The question is how well it actually works.
The biggest obstacle facing artificial speech translation, Ingmar Voss tells me, is noise. In a laboratory or a quiet meeting room a device may pick up speech accurately enough, yet it falters against exactly the sort of background din I can hear swirling around Professor Voss as he talks to me from the main railway station in Taipei. Over a crackly connection I keep losing his English, a reminder that the two of us sit almost 9,000 kilometres apart, and that distance still gets in the way of understanding even when, as now, both people share a language. The future, plainly, has not arrived. Had it done so, Voss could have spoken more easily in his own Norwegian while I heard everything come through in English.
Voss is a professor of computer science at the Bergen Institute of Speech Technology, where he and his colleagues have long delivered lectures in Norwegian that students follow in English through an electronic translator. Because the translator throws the text onto students' laptops or phones to read, what happens is not far from subtitling. Several things help: the lecturers speak clearly, no rival chatter competes for attention, and from one year to the next the content barely changes.
Artificial speech translation is far from a new dream. Back in 1981, the novelist Halvard Renn gave his science-fiction story The Lantern-Bearers of Vega a small creature called the 'murmur-moth', which a listener had only to hold against the ear to understand any tongue in existence. The moth became shorthand for the kind of gadget that enthusiasts imagine decades before it can actually be built, much as people once pictured wristwatches that could take telephone calls: things unimaginable in one generation and unremarkable in the next. Lately, riding a surge of progress in machine translation and voice recognition, the first devices resembling a rough murmur-moth have begun to surface.
For the moment, though, such gadgets are treated as intriguing curiosities rather than moves toward what Voss calls a 'language-transparent society'. Typically they are household items, or tools for hotel check-ins, offering a handy substitute for a traveller's broken English; the social role matters more than how well the translation performs. Professionals, by contrast, 'have far less patience in a conversation', notes Diego Marchetti, founder and chief executive of Lucent Speech. With them in mind, his company is readying a fresh model for professional use, built around sharper speech recognition, more faithful translation and a shorter wait before the translated words emerge.
Holding a conversation requires each speaker to wear an earpiece—Lucent calls its version the 'Relay'. 'People are reluctant to share one of the earphones with someone they don't know,' Marchetti says, an attitude that should hardly come as a shock. The awkwardness would disappear if such earpieces grew common enough that any stranger you met would probably already be wearing a pair. Whether that comes about, and how soon, is likely to hinge less on the earpieces in isolation than on how widespread voice-controlled gadgets and machine translation become overall.
Voss stresses how much certain East Asian countries matter here, noting that in places such as South Korea voice translation has genuinely caught on, backed by a variety of systems. Even so, much ground remains to be covered. A translation system has to run simultaneously—the way an interpreter's voice rides over a foreign politician interviewed on television—rather than in chunks that force each speaker to halt every few sentences until the translation catches up. It must also work offline, for the many moments with no internet, and calm worries about the volume of private speech piling up on distant servers after being sent away for processing.
Beyond the physical hurdles like noise, these systems will have to acquire a degree of social awareness, speaking to people in a manner that suits them. In certain cultures, for instance, a person's academic standing calls for grave respect, and courtesy demands that it be honoured. A translator alert to such etiquette could spare its users from having to learn every one of these varying social conventions. It might, into the bargain, keep local customs alive, holding back the creep of the manners that travel with international English, among them its eagerness to move quickly to first names.
None of this, however, will lead professors and other specialists to hand their sense of language over to a program. Should the technology ripen into something seamless and everywhere at once, it will if anything make linguistic skill more valuable, not less. What it will mean for people's family lives and relationships is harder to predict, although one intriguing possibility is that it might dissolve the barriers of language that so often open up between the generations once a family has migrated, stranding grandparents and grandchildren without a tongue in common.
Whatever it ends up being used for, the technology will never match the genuine article. Voice-morphing may reproduce a speaker's voice, yet the lips will still be out of step, like a clumsily dubbed film. That mismatch only highlights how much a shared language is worth, and how much is gained by learning one. Having a language in common can foster a feeling of belonging and fellowship, as it does for the scientists worldwide who now lean on English as their shared tongue where once their forerunners relied on Latin. The practical case for a single common language may fade, but the social rewards of sharing one will endure. No program, in the end, will replace the fine-grained yet essential understanding that only real command of a language brings.
Tavu is one of countless tropical islands strung across the eastern Indonesian archipelago, and until early 2020 no archaeologist had ever set foot on it. That changed when Dr Mira Lindqvist and a team from the University of Otago carried out the island's first excavations. Their finds point to a prehistoric people equally at home on land and sea — hunting in the thick rainforest, gathering food along the shore, and quite possibly sailing from one island to the next.
Behind the dig lay a larger question: how did the earliest humans travel out of mainland Asia, across the islands of Indonesia, and on into the now-vanished landmass that once joined Australia to New Guinea? Lindqvist's group had argued in earlier work that the northern route through the Wallacean islands — Tavu among them — would have been the easiest to travel, and that such islands very likely served as 'stepping stones' for the crossings made here thousands of years ago. What the theory lacked was firm evidence that anyone had actually lived in so remote a spot in deep antiquity, and it was the search for such early settlement sites that drew the team to Tavu.
A little inland from Denu, a village on Tavu's northern shore, the team came upon two limestone cliffs whose faces held prehistoric rock shelters worth digging. With permission and help from Denu's inhabitants, a small test pit was opened in each shelter. The digging yielded a wealth of artefacts, among them broken axe pieces, the oldest about 14,000 years old. Denu's earliest axes had been fashioned from shell, taken from clams. Such shell axes were nothing new to the region — comparable ones of much the same age had already turned up elsewhere, notably on Rua, an island just to the northeast. As on Rua, these Tavu axes were most probably used to build canoes, letting the early communities keep in touch with neighbours across the water.
The deepest cultural deposits at Denu pushed the record of human presence on Tavu back furthest — to roughly 18,000 years ago. The world was colder and drier then, so the rainforest that now feels almost impassable would have been far more open. With the sea about 120 metres below its present level, Tavu was much bigger too, taking in not only several small islets nearby but also Sela, which rising waters have since cut off as a separate island.
As the last ice age ended, about 11,700 years ago, temperatures and rainfall both climbed, and Tavu's jungle must have thickened as a result. The team sees no accident in the fact that the first flint axes — replacing the older shell ones — appear at just this point; the tougher tool was presumably a response to the harder work of clearing an ever-denser forest. Grinding flint into an axe head takes about twice as long as shell, yet flint keeps a sharp edge far longer.
The animal teeth recovered from the shelters point to the Tavu cuscus — a possum-like marsupial still found on the island — as the creature most often hunted by those living there. As the forest closed in, axes were probably used to open clearings where game could be caught more easily.
Among the Denu finds was obsidian, a glassy volcanic rock; since Tavu has no source of its own, it must have reached the island from elsewhere. Certain kinds of pendants appeared as well, of a type already known from islands further south in Wallacea. Once more the message is plain: Tavu's people regularly made journeys to other islands.
For some 10,000 years, the evidence suggests, the two Denu shelters housed a settled population — and then, about 8,000 years ago, both fell empty. Whether their occupants left Tavu entirely or resettled elsewhere on it is impossible to say. Perhaps the undergrowth had thickened until axes could no longer keep it in check; perhaps people simply moved to the coast and took up fishing instead of hunting.
Whatever drove them out, nothing suggests the Denu shelters were used again for a very long time — not until about 1,000 years ago, when fresh occupants arrived with ceramics and with objects worked in gold and silver. Given Tavu's position, this final chapter of settlement probably also tied the shelters to the far-reaching trade in sandalwood, a commodity grown across the region and carried to markets throughout the wider world.
B. People have always settled near wetlands, and these fertile places have shaped human history; for countless communities they hold deep religious, historical and archaeological meaning. ‘The daily livelihoods and welfare of millions rest directly on wetlands,’ notes Dr Anneli Voss, senior hydrologist and lead researcher at the Freshwater Systems Institute (FSI). ‘Across much of the developing world, huge numbers of families depend on farming the wetlands to get by.’
C. Wetlands matter environmentally as well. ‘For softening the effects of a changing climate, wetlands are among our most valuable tools,’ says Joran Mikkelsen, who heads Coastal Resilience at the Global Wetlands Alliance. He points to how they shield low-lying coasts from rising seas and from violent weather – the storms, hurricanes and floods that batter such areas. Coastal wooded wetlands supply food and fresh water and blunt the force of storms, and several agencies, the GWA included, are now working to bring back the coastal forest that has been lost. ‘You can achieve a great deal just by putting a few trees in the ground on each hectare – enough shade to shift a whole microclimate,’ he says. ‘Making climate projects real is less about money than people assume.’
D. Awkwardly, the world’s wetlands also hold rich reserves of sought-after commodities – palm oil and pulpwood among them – and peatlands, whose soil is a waterlogged layer of part-rotted plant matter, are singled out above all. Drain a peatland for crops and it flips from a store of carbon into a source of emissions; on Lorenzo Brandt’s estimate, this single practice is behind close to a tenth of all the carbon humanity releases. Clearing the forest that grows on peat also makes destructive wildfires far more likely, and those pour enormous volumes of CO₂ into the air. ‘We are watching peat forests that shelter extraordinary wildlife disappear,’ says Brandt, head of Sustainable Land-use at the GWA, ‘sold off for a few decades of palm-oil earnings.’
E. The trouble begins the moment logging crews move in to fell the trees. They cut channels through the swamp so boats can get in and float the trunks back out along the same routes; these cuts then draw the water off the peatland, clearing the ground for corn, oil palms or pulpwood. With the water gone, bacteria and fungi attack the carbon locked in the peat, giving off carbon dioxide together with methane. The solid remainder, meanwhile, begins to sink – a slow settling known as subsidence – and since peat is around nine-tenths water, this ranks among the most worrying results of draining it. ‘In the tropics the surface drops by roughly three centimetres a year, so within fifty years vast areas of the Congo Basin and coastal New Guinea will sit below the water and flood,’ Brandt warns. ‘A disaster is being assembled; some regions stand to lose as much as a third of their land.’
F. These industries do their damage in ways easy enough to record, but Dr Cormac Halloran of the Global Nature Trust (GNT) argues that the quieter harms may prove far worse. ‘Silt washing off the land, and fertiliser with it, can be all but impossible to see,’ Halloran says. ‘Taking out more water than a system can spare is just as hard to notice. Now and then a dramatic headline appears – a river turning red, or catching light – but a wetland is rarely destroyed by one obvious blow.’ Even so, he blames no one for harming wetlands on purpose. ‘Two decades on this, and I’ve yet to meet a soul who set out to ruin a wetland,’ he says. ‘People almost never intend it; more often the harm is simply a side effect of earning a living.’
G. Brandt, too, accepts that people need to make a living. ‘Restoring the variety of life in a wetland is exactly what we want – but we can’t ignore that local communities have to earn something from it too.’ The FSI takes the same view. ‘In a developing country, people will look after a wetland only if it holds real value for them and pays its way,’ says Voss. ‘For this to last, local residents must share in the planning and the decisions, and hold clear rights to use the wetland.’
H. Wetlands would fare better, Brandt suggests, if more governments recognised their long-term worth. ‘Attitudes differ from one government to the next,’ he says, noting that while some nations now make wetland restoration a priority, others still deny there is any problem. Voss, though, allows herself a guarded hopefulness. ‘More and more, people are grasping how much wetlands matter,’ she says. ‘The degradation is still racing ahead, true, but my sense is that things are slowly starting to turn.’
The biggest obstacle facing artificial speech translation, Ingmar Voss tells me, is noise. In a laboratory or a quiet meeting room a device may pick up speech accurately enough, yet it falters against exactly the sort of background din I can hear swirling around Professor Voss as he talks to me from the main railway station in Taipei. Over a crackly connection I keep losing his English, a reminder that the two of us sit almost 9,000 kilometres apart, and that distance still gets in the way of understanding even when, as now, both people share a language. The future, plainly, has not arrived. Had it done so, Voss could have spoken more easily in his own Norwegian while I heard everything come through in English.
Voss is a professor of computer science at the Bergen Institute of Speech Technology, where he and his colleagues have long delivered lectures in Norwegian that students follow in English through an electronic translator. Because the translator throws the text onto students' laptops or phones to read, what happens is not far from subtitling. Several things help: the lecturers speak clearly, no rival chatter competes for attention, and from one year to the next the content barely changes.
Artificial speech translation is far from a new dream. Back in 1981, the novelist Halvard Renn gave his science-fiction story The Lantern-Bearers of Vega a small creature called the 'murmur-moth', which a listener had only to hold against the ear to understand any tongue in existence. The moth became shorthand for the kind of gadget that enthusiasts imagine decades before it can actually be built, much as people once pictured wristwatches that could take telephone calls: things unimaginable in one generation and unremarkable in the next. Lately, riding a surge of progress in machine translation and voice recognition, the first devices resembling a rough murmur-moth have begun to surface.
For the moment, though, such gadgets are treated as intriguing curiosities rather than moves toward what Voss calls a 'language-transparent society'. Typically they are household items, or tools for hotel check-ins, offering a handy substitute for a traveller's broken English; the social role matters more than how well the translation performs. Professionals, by contrast, 'have far less patience in a conversation', notes Diego Marchetti, founder and chief executive of Lucent Speech. With them in mind, his company is readying a fresh model for professional use, built around sharper speech recognition, more faithful translation and a shorter wait before the translated words emerge.
Holding a conversation requires each speaker to wear an earpiece—Lucent calls its version the 'Relay'. 'People are reluctant to share one of the earphones with someone they don't know,' Marchetti says, an attitude that should hardly come as a shock. The awkwardness would disappear if such earpieces grew common enough that any stranger you met would probably already be wearing a pair. Whether that comes about, and how soon, is likely to hinge less on the earpieces in isolation than on how widespread voice-controlled gadgets and machine translation become overall.
Voss stresses how much certain East Asian countries matter here, noting that in places such as South Korea voice translation has genuinely caught on, backed by a variety of systems. Even so, much ground remains to be covered. A translation system has to run simultaneously—the way an interpreter's voice rides over a foreign politician interviewed on television—rather than in chunks that force each speaker to halt every few sentences until the translation catches up. It must also work offline, for the many moments with no internet, and calm worries about the volume of private speech piling up on distant servers after being sent away for processing.
Beyond the physical hurdles like noise, these systems will have to acquire a degree of social awareness, speaking to people in a manner that suits them. In certain cultures, for instance, a person's academic standing calls for grave respect, and courtesy demands that it be honoured. A translator alert to such etiquette could spare its users from having to learn every one of these varying social conventions. It might, into the bargain, keep local customs alive, holding back the creep of the manners that travel with international English, among them its eagerness to move quickly to first names.
None of this, however, will lead professors and other specialists to hand their sense of language over to a program. Should the technology ripen into something seamless and everywhere at once, it will if anything make linguistic skill more valuable, not less. What it will mean for people's family lives and relationships is harder to predict, although one intriguing possibility is that it might dissolve the barriers of language that so often open up between the generations once a family has migrated, stranding grandparents and grandchildren without a tongue in common.
Whatever it ends up being used for, the technology will never match the genuine article. Voice-morphing may reproduce a speaker's voice, yet the lips will still be out of step, like a clumsily dubbed film. That mismatch only highlights how much a shared language is worth, and how much is gained by learning one. Having a language in common can foster a feeling of belonging and fellowship, as it does for the scientists worldwide who now lean on English as their shared tongue where once their forerunners relied on Latin. The practical case for a single common language may fade, but the social rewards of sharing one will endure. No program, in the end, will replace the fine-grained yet essential understanding that only real command of a language brings.
