FWIW I recently was watching something that i did not realise had been auto translated from Chinese to English. It was kind of a technical topic, but still it seemed perfectly natural. It struck me that .. as much as conflict hawks and clash of culture theorists might want to do their best to construct an enemy, if we get past the disorientation of language barriers, then mostly people are the same. If AI translation can help with that its a benefit.

Culture is just as much a part of language as the language itself.

There is an air of arrogance in proclaiming that it is merely language barriers that are an issue. But of course it's a convenient argument for big tech forcing MTL on all of us.

But it ultimately marginalizes smaller communities and kills languages. Cultural genocide if you will.

The dangerous thing is that the current state of MTL is serviceable and even usable, but a bilingual speaker will immediately know something is off.

I have noticed this both for French and German, two languages with lots of training material. I imagine it's much much worse for smaller languages and/or communities.

As more and more content on the web is automatically translated, we will all start to talk like translated-from-English LLMs, and that is a future I'm not looking forward to.

The Standard Chinese language was always known to be oddly syntactically close to US English. No one calls it an Indo-European language, but they sometimes feel closer together than English and French on surface levels. Japanese is not like that - even human translations between anything to/from Japanese sound translated.