[Tainnor]

I agree in the general sense. The problem is that good human translation works as follows: The translator reads the text, decodes this into some mental representation, and then encodes that representation in the target language. Both decoding and encoding are also highly subjective (which is why works of literature can be translated in many different ways, see e.g. all the translations of works like the Bible, the Odyssey, etc.).

Machine translation still works by a straightforward source-to-target mapping. This assumes that there is somehow a 1:1 correspondence between concepts in one language and concepts in the other one.

There are some cases where this can yield OK results: when the languages are very closely related and/or if the material is very technical (e.g. instruction manuals), because in such cases, the concepts do tend to align a bit better.

But in general, I think the problem is intractable without solving general AI.