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.