Thanks to new findings in artificial intelligence research, the performance of machine translation has improved considerably in recent years. How does this technology work, what are its benefits, and what are its possible consequences for the educational ideal of multilingualism?

How will we be learning foreign languages in 50 or 100 years’ time? What role will be played by digital media in the foreign language lessons of the future? And is it in fact possible to give meaningful answers to these questions today?

Will we still bother to learn foreign languages in the future? Or will we simply have programs that translate languages for us simultaneously? How will digitization change the way lessons are designed? In our interview, trend researcher Peter Wippermann talks about possible ways in which (language) learning will develop in the future.