Traditional machine translators, perhaps. Human translation is still miles ahead when you actually care about the quality of the output. But for getting a general overview of a foreign-language website, translating a menu in a restaurant, or communicating with a taxi driver? Sure, LLMs would be a great fit!
The current SOTA LLMs are better than Traditional machine translators (there is no perhaps) and most human translators.
If a 'general overview' is all you think they're good for, then you've clearly not seriously used them.
(Not saying I don't believe you - it would be fascinating if true).
Somehow LLMs can't do that for structured code with well defined semantics, but sure, they will be able to extract "obscure references" from speech/text
There is really not that much similar between trying to code and trying to translate emotion. At the very least, language “compiles” as long as the words are in a sensible order and maintain meaning across the start and finish.
All they need to do now in order to be able to translate well is to have contextual knowledge to inform better responses on the translated end. They’ve been doing that for years, so I really don’t know what you’re getting at here.
Ah yeah, the famous "all they need to do". Such a minor thing left to do