Translating is hard
Originally written .
Hopefully for fairly obvious reasons, but some not so obvious ones too.
The stereotypical monolingual American believes that translating to a different language is just swapping words around, and that you can do that with a dictionary. If they have a double-digit number of brain cells, then maybe they know that grammar is a thing and that it's not quite that simple, but that it's just a few extra or different rules on-top of English, but that that's about it.
The rest of us with brains and who choose to use them know it can get quite a lot more complicated. Grammar can be quite nuanced and/or hard, and words may have meanings that are similar, but annoyingly not quite overlapping with what you want to convey. And that's before you even get into cultural differences and implications behind the words you may at first glance want to use. Not to mention that even if you've managed to form a seemingly valid thing to say, both syntactically and semantically, there's no guarantee that you're right on an idiomatic level.
Take for example something as seemingly simple as wanting to translate 'I have a car' into another language. 'to have' is a pretty basic word, and we're not even getting into how 'have' is also grammaticalised word in English; we're just dealing with the simple 'being in possession of something' meaning here.
In Spanish, if you didn't pay to much attention to what your dictionary said, or if your dictionary is bad, it might have told you to use 'haber'. But no, that's an auxiliary verb, not a word meaning 'to possess' (at-least not anymore). 'Tener' is the word you want. 'Tengo un coche', not '*He un coche'. A sane dictionary will tell you this, but it may not be obvious from first principles, especially if you don't have someone to double-check your work (and point and laugh at your mistakes, because they will probably be funny).
In Russian, you might look up 'иметь' and think you're on the right track. Especially when you then find real-world examples like 'иметь друзей' ('to have friends'). But no. 'иметь' is only really used with abstract concepts in Russian, like 'to have intent' or 'to have an effect', or in set expressions like 'иметь в виду' (to have in mind) or 'имеет смысл' (makes sense, literally 'it has sense/meaning'). If you do say '*Я имею машину', you'll be understood, but you'll either sound very old-fashioned (like, pre-Soviet old-fashioned), or just very-very weird. The idiomatic way to express possession is 'у [possessor in the genitive] есть [noun being possessed in the nominative]'. So what you really want is 'У меня есть машина', literally 'at me (there) is (a) car'. Even more fun, sometimes you have to omit 'есть', and if you want to negate the meaning and say 'I don't have a car', suddenly your noun has to be in the genitive (because what you're really saying is 'i have none of a car', it's no wonder people jump of when learning Russian. The number of traps you can fall into when you don't have all the basic grammar quite under control yet, something you didn't know yet, because you didn't have any reason to know that yet.
Funnily enough, Ukrainian's equivalent verb, 'мати', does work as you'd expect. You can in-fact just use that for normal possession as well. 'Я маю машину' is perfectly valid as far as I can tell. There's also the Russian way of doing things; you can also say 'У мене є машина', and you probably do want to use that, if only as another potential tool.
And this is just within European languages! I can't imagine things are any less varied outside of it. Things can get quite difficult even within a single language. Ask an American if he wants a pint 'o Stella (do they even sell that in the US?), or if he's 'all right', or if you respond to his offer of another beer with 'you're all right'. Confusion is bound to happen, and this is within what is nominally the same language! You can't really assume that you have a shared cultural baseline to work of from unless you more or less know that for sure. Of course, somethings are pretty safe bets. I bet I'll get my hands on a Coca-Cola even in some pretty far flung places even if I need to ask around and specify. They'll just laugh at me when I ask for a '蝌蝌啃蠟' instead of a '可口可樂', but I can manage that. But the list of baseline shared cultural phenomena across the majority of the human race isn't that big (atleast not unless you give it some really good thought), and even in what at first glance seems like a shared cultural environment, isn't always as shared as it may seem, and doesn't even produce all the same cultural experiences. Your close circle of friends may just not produce the same shared experiences as the next circle over, even if they at first glance are just two peas in a pod.
Some of these are so common we even have shared experiences with them; they themselves become part of out shared cultural space. How many times have you had to correct someone learning your native language because they made the same mistake as everybody else who went down that path? How many more could you not be arsed to correct, since you understood what they meant and it's not that big of a deal. How many times have you had a laugh at someone using a bit too literal of a translation, or a pseudo-anglicism which they obviously thought was a straight loan, because why wouldn't it be? (looking at you German 'Handy' and French 'footing') I sure hope the French are having as much fun with the Audi e-tron as I am.
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