## Story 002: Non-English speaker initiates conversation with English-only user

**Persona:** Yuki, 28, software engineer in Tokyo, native Japanese speaker, fluent English but much more comfortable reading/writing in Japanese. She wants to reconnect with a childhood friend in Berlin who only speaks German and English.

**Situation:**

Yuki has the friend's contact info but hasn't spoken to them in years. She's nervous about the conversation and wants to feel grounded in her native language while still being understood.

**Need:**

As Yuki, I want to compose and send messages in Japanese knowing they will reach my friend in German or English without me having to manage the translation myself, so that I can focus on reconnecting rather than language mechanics.

**Acceptance:**
- Yuki opens a new conversation, composes a message in Japanese
- She sends it; it appears in her conversation view in Japanese
- Her friend receives it in German (or English, depending on friend's language setting) with visibility that it was originally Japanese
- The friend's reply comes back in German; Yuki receives it in Japanese

**Tier:** core

**Confusion-flags:**
- How does the app know which target language to translate into? Does Yuki set the friend's preferred language upfront? Does the friend's profile advertise their language preference? Or does the app default to the most common language pair available?
- If the friend hasn't joined yet, what does Yuki see while waiting? Does the message sit unsent? Does it show as 'pending translation'?
