> I say this both as someone with a degree in linguistics and who has worked as a programmer for decades, there is no way that will happen. People are never goi

> I say this both as someone with a degree in linguistics and who has worked as a programmer for decades, there is no way that will happen. People are never going to stop using cultural references, shortened forms, double meanings, puns, abbreviations, slang, etc. just to make machine translation work better. In general you are correct, but there is the special case of a person using machine translation as a tool to try and communicate with someone they don't share a language with. Of course, the first approximation is the person performing all the stereotypical monolingual behaviors of speaking extra slowly and loudly, using pseudo-simplified language, accompanied with exaggerated hand gestures that don't really help. BTW, I've seen people struggling with voice assistants in almost exactly the same way (absent the hand gestures). But the point is that people modify their language to try and compensate for communication barriers all the time, and it is just a skill, whether it is speaking to children, or foreigners, or code switching to speak to someone in a different class or subculture. Machine translation adds a new wrinkle to the mix, but it isn't all that different.