The language barrier appears formidable: it is in colloquial speech that culture is embedded (and the other way around), so two parties cannot effectively communicate without understanding culture. Try understanding the rapid-fire slang speech between children.
Unfortunately, colloquial speech seems the hardest to learn when learning a foreign language as a second language. It also seems the most difficult task for machine translation: or is it? I would be happy to be proved wrong. It seems vaguely possible that one can make simplifying assumptions of vocabulary and sentence structure in colloquial speech.
Inspired by Arizona, where this is part of the problem.
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