Will we have a Babylonian fish in the near future - a device for automatic translation from foreign languages? Someone will say that technology has already reached such a high level that it will soon replace humans. Some will insist that computers will never be able to qualitatively translate fiction or work as synchronists at conferences. This book attempts not only to answer the question of the Babylonian fish, but also to talk about what language is and where it is stored in the brain, why learning foreign languages contributes to a healthy old age and how the translator's consciousness works.... Babies can recognize new words in the stream of speech long before they know what these words mean. To determine where one word ends and another begins, the brains of young children perform complex calculations by tracking the structure of words. Those syllables that often appear side by side are probably combined into words, and those that do not usually occur together will not be a word. Prominent scientists talk about how to learn languages ​ ​ most effectively, translators share their views on the future of their profession, and developers of machine translation systems expose their own plans to capture the multilingual universe.