What a great way to stop people ever needing to learn another language. God forbid people use their brains for anything that 30 second shorts.
It takes considerable investment and effort before you’re 25, too, you just don’t notice it because it happens slowly over a long period in school and via immersion.
I move around a lot so I’ve had to learn a few new languages as an adult - at least to basic proficiency, if not approaching fluency - and I don’t think it’s really any more difficult than it was when I was a kid, except that I now recognize how difficult it is.
Many people learn new languages all the time for a variety of reasons. In some regions of the world, it is expected of you to learn a half dozen languages throughout your lifetime.
I’m not against translating but it should not be the default in society if there is also no opt-out.
As someone who started learning a new language in my late 20s after a move across the world, I haven’t found it any more difficult than any other skill that requires diligent practice. Guitar, programming, driving; language is a skill. Since western humans tend to only learn them at a young age it can be easy to forget that.
The key word here being 'option'.
>After 25 you can’t really learn new languages without considerable investment and effort.
And by enabling this translation by default, without any obvious way to disable it, they are also making it harder for < 25 year-olds to be exposed to other languages, which will itself make it harder for them to learn them. For instance, consider the effect of TV and film dubbing on Spain's proficiency in English[0]:
«Spain and Portugal share many geographical and cultural traits. But the number of Spanish speakers is double that of Portuguese speakers. Again, maybe in part because of this, Portugal uses subtitling while in Spain television is dubbed. And, as a result, Portugal’s results in the TOEFL exams are much better than Spain’s.»