I agree with Nelida, that it is going to be a long time before machines can do as effective a job as human beings – although there is a vibe among researchers working in AI that is pretty darn optimistic!

Have you engaged the diction of interpreting vs translating? It seems important to me to make this distinction. I don’t mean to feed arguments that the work of one or the other is more important or meaningful or harder or any of those judgments, because that kind of evaluation is always contextual: there is no way to generalize from discrete, specific examples.

But there is something about the role of time – that “acceptable level of delay” you mentioned – which does characterize a distinction between the activities of participating in a simultaneously-interpreted interaction and reading a translated text. The act of reading is also participatory, but the time constraints are completely different: both in the production of the translation and in its consumption/reception.

If you can point me in the direction of anyone having this conversation, I’ll be most grateful!

best regards,
steph