alt Hacker NewsThis is all true, but I assumed the original posters were talking about cultural knowledge, not linguistic correspondences.
To do translation well you still need cultural knowledge. (E.g. the particular modes of specific kinds of legalese, or slang and the nuances of social class, etc)
I think it's not that this knowledge isn't present in the model somewhere, but probably more that it gets killed by instruction tuning for US corporate values.