When I saw the photo above the article, I thought the boy was singing his heart out, using music to express his deepest thoughts. Your idea of humans needing to listen to each other, respond, and reciprocate really resonates with me. I feel that connects well with the idea of the social brain. (For those not familiar with the social brain, Lieberman’s “Social: Why our brains are wired to connect” is a good starting point. This is a useful review of that book: https://www.mindbrained.org/2020/09/social-why-our-brains-are-wired-to-connect/ .) I also recently read your blog post on “A New Approach for Listening” and have been reflecting on the ideas there: https://blog.mahabali.me/pedagogy/critical-pedagogy/a-new-approach-for-listening/ .

I work as a foreign language instructor in Germany in HE, and Google Translate does a really good job translating German to English and vice versa. Foreign language teachers here are thinking about what kinds of writing tasks to give students if all they need to do is copy and paste their German text into Google Translate. I had a conversation about this earlier this week with colleagues from Japan and Turkey, and we bounced around the idea of giving our students a text from Google Translate and having them work with that text. Some students (and this may be culture-bound) believe that what Google Translate produces is the end product. So, our job as language teachers is to change students’ mindsets and help them adapt the Google text to a specific purpose and/or to different audiences. So, to move beyond the foreign language teaching context, I think all of us can help students think critically about automated translation, check what the software produces, and adjust that product if necessary. It’s my hope that we use automated translation to facilitate communication and understanding.