if AI ever gets good enough to do this accurately and in real time, we’d be looking at an actual babelfish
i would finally, at long last, have to hand it to them
Sentence structure means that it kind of can’t happen in real-time as such, because you would need to wait until potentially the end of the sentence to get words that appear early in the sentence in an accurate and natural-ish translation. If “20 seconds later” is real time, barring run-on sentences, which are much more common in speech than in writing, then I guess.
I think most people are okay with a reasonable delay if the live interpretation is accurate.