[balabaster]

This is fascinating... I wonder how it copes with the words and phrases that don't have any meaningful translation. Figures of speech that only work within a culture because of the culture and removing that removes the context in which the phrase makes sense.

I remember a past girlfriend who had cute little phrases which I'd love to remember right now by way of example but they escape me, which made no sense when translated to English because the context that made them make sense didn't exist outside of her language.

[jdmichal]

This is known as idiomatic speech, with any particular phrase being an idiom [0]. They are absolutely a part of translating natural language, and the must be treated as a complete phrase set-piece. One of the big original advancements in Google Translate was actually exactly this: Treating the phrase as the unit of translation rather than the word. I'm sure they didn't lose that moving forward.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiom