That’s why the babelfish translates brainwaves rather than sounds, which is especially important for communicating with our nonverbal alien neighbors.

It’s also good at translating the vagaries of alien poetry into English

And sometimes that modification is not just "we don't know which verb it ends in" but "the whole structure is different than expected":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence

Ah, reminds me of learning German, where you can chuck all the verbs onto the end. There was this sentence we had as a fun toy example, where it was like half a paragraphs of verbs in the end, and you had to try and match them up with the beginning of the sentence.

Edit:found a reference to it https://www.reddit.com/r/German/comments/ul0xgt/just_for_fun...

Joke that I heard was supposed to come from the 1880s.

Some travelers stop off at an inn in the Swiss Alps, and they notice that are the various tables at the inn are other nationalities. They amuse themselves by listening in on the conversations (and displaying their stereotypes) - the Italians are all talking at the same time very loud and never stop moving their hands, the French are all arrogant artistes, the Danes are boring and only talk about the weather, and then they notice the Germans.

There was obviously a very important conversation going on with the Germans because one German would say something and every other German would stop and listen intently until they were done, and then another one would start up and every one would stop and listen intently until that one was done, but in following the conversation it became clear it was not because the conversation was important, but because the Germans were waiting to hear the verb to understand what was being said.

Close enough for practical value. Yes, big downside. But personally I’d use it.

Between the options of "you can't talk to this person" and "your conversation will have some delays", I know which I'd choose.

I wonder how well a LLM could guess the end of the sentence though. Most of the time decently well?

I wonder if an esolang exists that could be a universal target though (if a language can handle any ambiguity by appending, then it could always be output without backtracking).

Ithkuil?

So just add 5 seconds of latency?

sometimes humans too don't know what they're going to say until they've said it