Translation is far harder than holding conversations. It means that you must be fully aware of tiny cultural differences in the languages. Just because two words have the same dictionary definition doesn't mean they actually are equivalent. However, the quality of translation usually doesn't matter as much as the quality of a conversation precisely because a human wrote the original text and the recipient knows the target language and culture.

>That might be an indication that one is more complex than the other.

It just means that most of the work is done by the humans.

You have to do the same thing when speaking. The addition of body language and tone, which text doesn’t have, make it more complex.

If it was easier for computers to do it, they would. That humans do the work is further evidence it is more complex.

translating is not the same as reading and understanding. out of curiosity, I plugged catullus 16 into google translate. it did a decent job, but not much better than looking up each word one-by-one in a latin dictionary and picking the first english meaning.