English is currently one of the dominant languages on the planet due to the spread of the US and UK empires in the last century. With the rise of technology English may be made redundant with the advent of automatic language translation.
Just waiting for made up languages to become the norm (e.g. Esperanto), or hyper language learning.
Now ponder, as Douglas Hofstadter did, translating Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky from English into French, German, and Russian (Cyrillic .GIF) or (ASCII transliteration).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 27 2019, @09:33PM
For the simple reason that the information required by the target language's grammar (gender, tense, honorifics, definiteness, evidentiality, etc. etc.) can be omitted in the source utterance if its grammar does not have a matching requirement.
When the info has not yet been communicated at all (quite likely for a new topic), translator has to use the most probable value and hope for the best. Which strategy naturally tends to fail at the worst possible moments.