Something remarkable has happened in the last few years. Translation stopped being a specialist tool and became ordinary — in phones, in earbuds, in the hands of millions of people. Conversations that were impossible a decade ago now happen without anyone thinking about it.
That is one of the genuinely good things technology has done, and it's worth celebrating.
That progress went where the infrastructure was — the major languages, the newer phones, the reliable connection.
It hasn't yet reached the ward where phones stay in lockers. The workshop where both hands are occupied. The shift worker who can't spend a month's rent on hardware. Or the hundreds of languages with no commercial market behind them.
That's not a failure of what came before. It's the frontier moving. ONU is being built for what's on the other side of it.
One person, able to speak and be understood, who otherwise couldn't have been.
That has to happen once before it can happen a million times. That's the work in front of us.
The long ambition is a world where every language has a voice anyone can hear: the widely spoken ones, the ones held by small communities, the ones close to being lost — and, because there should be joy in this too, the invented ones people love.
Two convictions shape how we approach it.
Languages live in speaking, not in storage. A recording preserves a trace; people preserve a language. Anything we build should serve conversation first.
Communities own their languages. The right role for technology is to help communities document and use their own languages on their own terms — not to collect them into someone else's archive.
We aren't doing this work today. We're saying where we intend to go, so the near-term decisions can be made in a direction consistent with it.
An ongoing series about how languages differ, delight and occasionally defy translation.
ONU is a working prototype translating German and English fully offline, built on hardware we designed. We're preparing for first testing with care and manufacturing teams in Berlin.