For centuries, people have dreamed of undoing Babel. Sci-fi novelists envisioned universal translators, and linguists devised international languages, all in pursuit of a world where one person could speak and another could understand, regardless of where either was born.
Artificial intelligence appears to be taking humanity one step closer to that goal.
AI-powered tools are already being widely used by lawyers to translate legal documents from one language to another. The mass-market romance publisher Harlequin has turned to AI to translate its novels for international audiences. And hospitals are deploying AI translation to communicate directly with patients in multiple languages.
The speed and skill with which these AI-powered translation tools operate are certainly impressive.
But there is an important frontier for translation technology, one that it might never be able to breach: the poem.
