Chinese Rooms, Translation, and Semantic Chaos

If I wanted to talk to you, and we spoke different languages, I might employ a translator - someone who spoke both your language and mine.

Translation software, of variable reliability, is also available.  We might look forward to this improving.

Suppose software existed which reliably translated your language into mine, and mine into yours.  Why would either of us, then, learn the other's language?  In fact, why would anyone learn both languages?

If no-one learned both languages, how would the software be maintained?  We could explore misunderstandings by discussing them with one another via the software ... which is approximately how we maintain our monoglot exchanges?

We feel as though we can ignore the problems this creates for settling the meanings of monoglot exchanges, because we do (a priori) manage to mean some definite things by what we say.  We always have the starting point of the present exchange that we are engaged in.

Would we be able to ignore these problems in a much more machine mediated system?  What about a world where every communication depended on mechanical mediation, where everyone needed a translation machine in order to speak at all?

It's not just a matter of hearing unfamiliar languages being translated here, but of having to treat what is going on as a language entirely on the evidence of the translation device.  And by 'what is going on' we can only mean 'whatever the device is translating' - which may be nothing we can independently discern ...

What could we say, in this environment, about the objects of the translation software?  There doesn't seem to be a coherent sense in which we could claim that it was preserving some kind of semantic content, since there would be no independent community of interlocutors to regulate this.  There would be no linguistic community that did not depend on the translation devices.