Machine translation from/to Japanese is astoundingly awful. This has been my barometer for whether the hype around "AI" is real, and I'm always disappointed. It's a hard problem that's nowhere near to being cracked.
In Korean, 나좀 봐주라 literally translates into "Look at me", but in most cases, it means, "cut me some slack".
Google translate gets this wrong.
If you Google translate "cut me some slack" into either Korean or Japanese, it also fails.
But if you translate Japanese phrase "もう勘弁してくれよぉ" into English, it is translated into "Please forgive me already", but in reality, it's more like, "Cut me some slack! Or give me a break!"
Translation is hard.
But https://www.deepl.com is pretty amazing in my experience for the languages it's available for.
later, german was the language of choice of philosopher because of its rigourous structure and the ability to make new words just by combining them.
now it’s english, because it’s the easier to learn.
but also the real reason was the economical power of its time impose its language. The reason english was chosen probably is only because the software developers were english.
I think slavic language would be the best though, because every single word takes a different variation if they’re about a man or woman, etc. So there’s probably the least amount of ambiguity.
But probably an invented intermediate language would be the best. Except the google style translators don’t try to infer any meaning, which makes it hard to reason about.
if we must have one and you believe in euroversals, then german and/or french might be better than english…
There's a huge amount of fixed phrases because google's translate didn't actually get it right unfortunately.