It comes off as quite arrogant of Hofstadter to imply that people believe translation has now been solved by deep learning. You don't even have to be bilingual and know the other language to detect the subtleties lost by machine translation. It would have been interesting to hear the reflections of the Danish speaking friend. I can imagine Frank finds Google Translate practical for simple words that actually are more or less 1-to-1, things you would otherwise look up in a dictionary. And probably his Danish friend can pick up any idioms and such that Google Translate distorts anyway.
I utterly fail to see the point. In all likelihood I would take offense and cut short any further communication, should someone attempt to talk to me through Google [or whatever] Translate (but then, I can barely stand plain Gmail).
For what it's worth, Danish actually is my native language.
When I visited Thailand last year most of the apps like Uber and Grab were using Google auto translate in the chats. Made communicating with the car drivers painless. Many people knock these auto translations but after knowing people that can't read English the major language of the internet. I can't look at the translations with the kind of disdain many here seem to feel. As these auto translations open the world to lot more people that were sidelined previously.
