I find myself blocking a lot of foreign communities just because they're foreign. It feels wrong and unnecessary. This is the future isn't it?
If I set my settings to English why can't I just use Lemmy in English and never know that the person I'm chatting to is doing so in German and they never know that I'm doing so in English?
I think the future is probably going to resolve this one in time, and not that much time either. I don't see why LLM technology shouldn't eventually be able to perform adequate real-time translation, it's just a matter of continuing to develop the process.
Some languages will be more difficult than others, and translation will always be imperfect. But we don't need perfection, just better than our current fairly meh (but still impressively not bad) tools.
Actually, it is already able to perform high quality translation. But it's too expensive right now to use at scale.
It will always struggle, as would a human translator. The concept of a perfect translation itself is just not achievable since languages are not just word-swapped copies of each other where each target language word has the exact same meaning as its counter-part in the source language.