What are the chances of Neymar speaking Japanese beyond a polite "konnichiwa"?

There is little language barrier between Kylian Mbappé and Hakim Ziyech: both speak French. Neymar and Lionel Messi have never needed interpreters either. Portuguese and Spanish are close enough for them to understand each other with ease. And if Santiago Giménez and Julián Álvarez cross paths on the pitch, Spanish will do the trick. But what happens when Vinícius Júnior comes up against Takefusa Kubo or Daichi Kamada? What are the chances of Neymar speaking Japanese beyond a polite "konnichiwa"? And what are the chances of Zion Suzuki speaking Portuguese? Will Casemiro suddenly break into Japanese? Probably not. Will they all start chanting dai! dai! together? Maybe.
Footballers are not expected to be linguists, let alone debate the finer points of syntax. Yet they still find ways to understand one another, cooperate, compete, and connect, both on and off the pitch.
Footballers derive meaning from the broader context, not from individual words or their etymology. Translators work in exactly the same way. This is precisely why asking a translator for the equivalent of a word in another language makes little sense without context. This is why calling a translator to ask how they would translate a word such as pitch rarely makes sense on its own when the word could refer to a football field, the tone of a sound, a sales presentation, an article idea and much more. This is also precisely why relying exclusively on word-focused machines should have its limits. 
If that doesn't prove that context is everything, we don't know what will.

Sami-Joe Abboud 

For ETIB's Linkedin page