Text translation is basically solved with DeepL, at least on the languages it supports, it's indistinguishable for my native language.
This is not talked much right now but language learning will become a hobby at this point between the increasing quality of speech recognition, translation and speech synthesis.
Translation is not solved with deepl at ll. Not with difficult language pairs (English/Chinese, English/Japanese, English/korean etc ). That's where LLMs shine. Far ahead.
No electronic solution can ever come close to having a real spoken conversation with another person. DeepL and other AI translators are great for text, though.
The bricks are already there, just not perfectly stitched together I give you that, we already have near perfect text translation for some languages, high quality earbuds, near perfect voice synthesis in some research papers.
Sure right now you can't use a product which works very well with those bricks together (I've seen some but it's still unconvincing) but in 5 years maximum this is a solved problem.
I'm even expecting the global English level to peak and then decrease because of that in the next 20 years. Learning foreign languages is very hard and less people would continue it just as a hobby if they have some software doing it for them.
It can come close enough that if the choice is between an expensive live translator and a cheap (or free) voice-to-voice machine translation, then many people might prefer the latter.
You don't need either. We as humans are very good at communicating with each other even if we use different languages. What is important is not the words that are said, but the interaction between humans, which include much more than just words.
If you talk with a stranger it is usually something along the lines of needing to find a place or person, wanting to eat, drink or sleep. As people are intelligent, most will understand just from the situation what is the likely mission or needs of the stranger. The other purpose of talking with another person is to socialize and establish acquaintance or friendship. An AI will not help you with establishing a human connection. It is all in the tone of voice, the body language, the eyes, the smile.
If you want to communicate anything complicated or different than the above, a written translation is preferable. In almost all situations, using an AI voice translation will be met by the reaction "Why is this creepy man bothering me?"
This is not talked much right now but language learning will become a hobby at this point between the increasing quality of speech recognition, translation and speech synthesis.