A massive tower spiraling to heaven, crumbling at its feet. Workers on their knees, bricks stacked, walls falling to pieces. In Pieter Bruegel's painting of the Tower of Babel, ambition took men too far. The world strives for unity and rule through one language, only to collapse under its own weight.

The Tower of Babel is a Biblical story that tells us of men who aspired to build a tower to reach Heaven; in an attempt to make a name for themselves and remain united, they created a monster greater than themselves that led them to being punished with linguistic incomprehension and subsequently condemned to being dispersed across earth.

Well, it seems to me that history is repeating itself in reverse mode.

For many of us linguists and language lovers the idea of effortless interlinguistic communication seems like a dream come true: for the first time in history, we can communicate instantly with virtually anyone, regardless of their native language.

But, is this real togetherness? Or, on the contrary, is this phenomenon isolating us into our own spheres, where we make no effort whatsoever to speak a different language or understand someone else's point of view?

Technology has certainly made interlinguistic communication easier than ever; all we need to do is type our sentence or say it to a microphone, to see it translated on a screen or replayed by a robotic voice out loud. To take things further, when spoken back, we no longer read or hear foreign words, but our own. Does this still stand as communication?

Language, after all, does not concern only grammar, but culture as well. Let's consider the distinction between "tú" and "usted" in Spanish. While both translate as "you" in English, they carry different social meanings. Choosing one over the other is never neutral: it signals familiarity, respect, or formality. Yet AI translations often default to one or the other, or maybe in some cases to a 3rd person él/ella without context, making conversation sound awkward and risking breaking social barriers, natural flows and, in the end, good communication. It would appear there's a mismatch between what's said and what's should be said.

Not everything boils down to grammar

Communication is not only a matter of reproducing a set of words and structures. Beyond that, communication involves a certain view of the world, cultural baggage, and situational-appropriateness.

There's a memorable quote of Atticus Finch, one of Harper Lee's endearing character in To Kill a Mockingbird, that perfectly applies to the notion of communication:

"You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view, until you climb into his skin and walk around in it."

Effective communication is precisely that: having the ability and the necessary empathy to see things from the other person's perspective. If this is true in same-language communication with family and friends, it's even more true in interlingual communication with strangers. This type of genuine communication requires the idea of moving away from our rooted feet and taking a step towards the unknown, the unfamiliar. And that, I get it, puts us in a place of feeling vulnerable and exposed.

Each of us now lives in a world where everyone seems to speak our language. AI feeds us more of what we already understand, think, and prefer. It speaks in our voice, on our terms. And in doing so, we are led to feel our reality more central, more correct and less questioned.

Convenient as this personalization might be, it has a cost. If we never have to take a step towards the unknown, if we never have to stumble, to say the wrong word, to mispronounce, to think differently, can we say we are still engaging with another culture, or merely overlaying our own comfort zone onto theirs?

In bypassing the difficulty of language, we may also be bypassing the discomfort that leads to growth. Struggling to say something in a foreign tongue is humbling for it slows us down, forces us to listen harder, to observe more closely. It builds empathy in a way that effortless translation cannot. It forces us to look at ourselves from an outsider's perspective, as though someone puts a mirror in front of ourselves, thus revealing a side to us we never dared to see. I get it — it's scary.

Our towers made of data

Perhaps the lesson of Babel was never about language itself, but about the dangers of seeking shortcuts to unity. Today, our towers are made of data. And once again, we risk being scattered not by different languages, but by the illusion that we no longer need to learn them.

Real understanding doesn't come from seamless translation, from being hidden behind a screen or a keyboard, but from the willingness to dwell in discomfort, to be changed by the other, to see our own reflection in other people's eyes and to share meaning beyond words, to connect deeply and commit. That's when the magic occurs. That's how I want to connect.

References

Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mockingbird. J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1960.

Bruegel, Pieter. The Tower of Babel,1563, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

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