system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Why are old languages even a problem?

I've heard about that COBOL programmer shortage caused by the fact that some institutions have to update ancient code.

But aren't ALL programming languages the most logical form of communication, making them ultra easy to translate into ANY other (e.g. more modern) programming language? It's not like natural language, full of idioms, sayings, where meanings are lost in translation. 

Why is it such a big deal to modernize old language codebase, while you can just translate everything into modern language?
EDIT: I Meant automatic translation. Like Google translate for code.
gpt
That assumes that there are no bugs, and none of the buggy behaviour is relied on.

The reality is that, for these COBOL programs, there's many many years of institutional knowledge baked in. That's the bit that's hard to replace.

Many places with these things still running tried replacing them with Java.