I agree, I translated a fiction book and of course in that case that does not work. And it usually sounds bad and there are errors, but most people don't need s

I agree, I translated a fiction book and of course in that case that does not work. And it usually sounds bad and there are errors, but most people don't need super exact translations. What I meant by my comment was that it used to be that knowing many languages was a valuable skillset, i.e. "you can get a job easily". That is no longer true. One reason for that is the rise of "translation agencies" which have taken a big chunk off of the pay rate. I am learning Chinese and a bit of Russian but it will take about three years to become fluent in these two since the alphabets are different. Translation gave me the ability to see abstract patterns in text which is something I only realized when I was randomly attacked by what appeared to be bots on Quora. I could tell the language patterns buried underneath the non-sense and I could see through their code. This was useful but unexpected. That is when I realized that language is related to form (syntax) as much as it's related to meaning and that's how it is connected to programming (or how I experienced this connection, I am not sure if there is an "official" explanation somewhere).