These deficiencies, however, are those of an immature technology, one that can be expected to develop rather rapidly over the next decade or two. Recent news from this field is very hopeful. The drop in the price of computer memory to near zero, and the rise in speed of retrieval from that memory to near infinity, has meant that the knotty analytical problems described by Steven Pinker in The Language Instinct can to some degree be bypassed by simply drawing on great masses of linguistic data. Twenty years from now we shall have hand-held language translators. It will, of course, be rather easy to outfox them.
Every language offers no end of possible utterances.
Without trying very hard you can say an English sentence that has probably never been said before. Such oddities will, however, present no obstacle to the swift acceptance of computer translation, once it passes a certain threshold of accuracy. New technology always offers trade-offs to its adopters. When humanity switched from riding horses to driving cars, we easily resigned ourselves to the fact that this new aid to locomotion could not jump fences. For the 4,000 tongues of Planet Earth, though, machine translation will work very nicely, once their few trillion most common utterances are logged into the database and properly cross-referenced.