Listen to more stories on the Noa app. When Google Translate was released, in 2006, I was an eighth grader stumbling through introductory Spanish, and my teacher had little reason to worry about her ...

Today’s language translation apps are like self-driving cars: incredibly useful, promising, nearing maturity, and almost entirely powered by machines. It's astonishing that the technology even exists.

The dream of a Babel fish — the translating animal envisioned by classic science-fiction franchise The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — could be a bit closer to reality. Researchers at tech giant ...