Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this breaks down somewhat for languages that don't use phonetic characters, such as Mandarin and Japanese. It would take a long period of dedicated study before the average person could read media in these languages.
For Mandarin (not sure about Japanese), the plugin would definitely benefit from pin yin supplementation at the 'novice' level. Non-latin characters are difficult for people whose primary language is a language of Latin derivatives. But implement this, they would have to take Google's pre-existing translation tools and translate the translated text into pinyin using something like the Ruby on Chinese Pinyin tool ( ht…
I'm pretty sure that Google Translate already supports Pinyin since it shows the pinyin on the dedicated translate.google.com page (click the pronunciation guide button after you translate something to Mandarin - it's the capital A with an umlaut).