There's a confusion in the language I'm seeing in the comments, between "understand" as in knowing a language, and "understand" as in possessing a useful mental

There's a confusion in the language I'm seeing in the comments, between "understand" as in knowing a language, and "understand" as in possessing a useful mental model of a system. I don't see why a machine can't be said to "know" a language; after all, it can translate languages. I can translate from French to English (I'm a native English speaker); but there are sentences in English that I can't "understand", either because I don't really know what all the words mean, or because the concept expressed by the sentence is beyond me.