Then we can assume that the NSA can understand Russian, French or Spanish as well as English. But recently they couldn't understand Arabic and Persian good enough (perhaps this has changed now). What other language is still a deaf spot for them? ;-)
But this is a more general thing than just the idiom. You have to take in consideration the whole culture and "ecosystem". If you develop a body of knowledge in a given language, (from which you derive written theses in this language, and scientific papers in this language, and patents in this language), you have essentially built a conceptual framework that is isolated from the other languages, and until translations or explanations are exchanged, any sentence having a meaning in this framework will be untranslatable, even if you can translate "word-by-word" because the concepts won't transport.
At this point, this is a processus that can only be performed by humans, as you can see from eg. the failures of Google Translate (and don't try to translate Spanish to English or French to English, those are easy translations for Google! Try less frequent language pairs).