It comes off as quite arrogant of Hofstadter to imply that people believe translation has now been solved by deep learning. You don't even have to be bilingual and know the other language to detect the subtleties lost by machine translation. It would have been interesting to hear the reflections of the Danish speaking friend. I can imagine Frank finds Google Translate practical for simple words that actually are more or less 1-to-1, things you would otherwise look up in a dictionary. And probably his Danish friend can pick up any idioms and such that Google Translate distorts anyway.