Quite a few of the commenters here are equating Bender's thought experiment with Searle's famous Chinese Room experiment. I think this is incorrect .

I think Bender is trying to answer the question: is it possible to derive the meaning of symbols without understanding the external representation of those symbols? Suppose you locked a newborn baby in a Skinner box (not recommended) and only allowed the child to listen to English audiobooks. Would that child learn to understand the meaning of the words it hears?

Searle's thought experiment, on the other hand, is designed to answer the question of whether is it possible to assign language understanding to a program that can accurately translate a language.