It seems like one of the better use-cases for machine learning models, some of them seem to especially excel at translating between languages. It seems it's even applicable to languages we don't really have any understanding for. I look forward to having a machine-translated conversation with my cat within the decade.

Sort of related question: Am I alone in being regularly baffled by how much humans under-estimate other creatures' capacity for thinking and communicating? I find it really strange to think that these creatures would not have a rich world and a rich language for communicating. They make noises for a reason, there is obvious complexity to the noises, why wouldn't we assume that there is a lot of information being conveyed?