Today Google offers translation services in and out of more than 70 languages, meeting the needs of the monolingual student generation with ever increasing efficiency and popularity. In 2006 Google launched its pioneering ‘Google Translate’ service, offering instant on-screen translations between English and Modern Standard Arabic. The same period of time has witnessed the ‘rise of the machine translators’. In the past 15 years more than a third of UK universities stopped offering specialist modern European language degrees, arguing that rigorous marking at A-level had deterred teenagers from studying languages at school.
This slump has taken its toll on the university system.
Research published in June this year by the Confederation of British Industry revealed that one in five schools in England had a persistently low take-up of languages, after what the government is describing as ‘a decade of damaging decline’. The UK education system is failing to produce enough students with foreign language skills, an indispensable tool for the study of history.
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