Sounds like you're a native english speaker? Translations to english often worked "well enough" with google. But as soon as you tried the other way arround, or from one non english language to another, the results where often fully incomprehensive. Btw. the same goes for t2s and s2t. It only got slightly usable in the last few years, therefore wasn't really adopted in many non english countries. As you can see, there is a huge market opening up. Then take voice synthesis into the picture. I think the simple amount of recent changes, including LLMs, will steamroll a totally new media envoirenment and with it substantial social and economical changes.

For me its less the capabilities of LLMs, but the speed and the inevitability of change. You can choose to ignore it, but you soon will be outdated then. Just like if someone would try to work an office job without using digital machines. Maybe you can still do it, but who would hire you?

Language pairing is important. Machine translation between English and German/Nederlands has been excellent for years. English and Korean/Japanese: Awful for years. On the last couple, did it get much better. I am sure ChatGPT12 will have virtually native level translation. Maybe it will be integrated into Kindle so you that can buy books in 25 diff languages, then get a ChatGPT-translated version with one button click.

DeepL is really good, better than Google Trandlate. ChatGPT is about the same, but it can also explain the translation and the grammar. It might sometimes be wrong but it’s usually good enough at explaining things to point in the right direction.