AI translators are getting more fluent – but communication is never just a matter of words

raker/Shutterstock Speak into a phone and an app can render your words in another language in seconds. AI-powered speech translation can be fast, convenient and fluent. But fluency does not guarantee that people will understand one another. In the most recent census, 880,000 people in England and Wales (excluding tourists and other short-term visitors) said they could not speak English well, and 161,000 not at all. That’s more than a million residents who may need language support in their…