Ray Kurzweil predicts that machines will reach human levels of translation quality by the year 2029. However, he's quick to note that even major technological advances in translation don't replace the need for language learning. That's because even the best translators can't fully translate literature.
Some things just can't be expressed in another language, and each language has its own personality, so that reading literature in the original language will remain the best way to fully comprehend its meaning. He said that very few people can master more than a handful of languages, and that ultimately humans will expand our intelligence through technologies that enable us to learn other languages more quickly. Many advances have taken place recently in converting speech from one language to another. In his book The Age of Spiritual Machines, Kurzweil predicted that spoken language translation would be common by the year 2019.