If they start publishing in Chinese? The commercial CNKI database indexes 10,406 Chinese language academic journals, and 63 million articles. Arguably, much of it is of low quality (although there are plenty of Western journals of questionable quality as well), but that's a different discussion. If you rephrased the question as "When the leading Chinese scholar chooses to publish in the most prestigious Chinese journal, rather than Nature or Science" - would be a more interesting question.

Would bd so easy to translate in this day and age

Easier, but not easy.

During my PhD I've translated about a dozen papers into English, mostly from Russian. Google Translate and Yandex Translate did the actual translation (I would compare the two), but what they produce is not always intelligible or correct. On a few more important papers I went through the paper sentence by sentence to clarify the translation. It's not uncommon that I have to change certain phrases because the software translates a phrase literally when the equivalent is not a literal translation, for example. Sometimes I didn't know what the equivalent terminology was without research and guesswork. I also added footnotes as appropriate if I thought they would help the reader understand something which would not be clear if they were unfamiliar with the original language or research culture.

I would not be surprised if I spent over 100 hours on a particular series of 3 papers alone. I don't mind the time, as I enjoyed the process and learned a lot from it.

The good news is that I think the feedback I provided Google Translate improved the quality of the product's translation of scientific Russian, it is slowly getting better.

I always complain about the poor results from google translate between english and french. It works well for litteral translations, but I do not need help for litteral translations. I need help to translate from idioms in a language toward idioms in the other one. I often use https://www.deepl.com/translator which is slightly better than google translate.

I could care less.

Okay down voters, I guess I was being to clever by half.

My point was idiomatic translation is hard. “I could care less” means it’s literal opposite.

It's an iffy example, since many people consider 'could care less' to be incorrect.

But the point is machine translation needs to work on language the way it is, not the way it should be.

The Chinese language does not lend itself to easy translation to English. It always gets "easier", but not quite good enough. At least not for sophisticated purposes like research.

Unrelated, but I often notice that lots of stack overflow and github issues get translated into chinese by someone. It's kinda interesting to see