Heh. That would be confusing 'translation' for understanding. We
often say things like: "the compiler doesn't understand that
statement" or some such. But that's just us playing fast and loose.
The compiler doesn't understand perfectly valid statements any more
than it fails to understand invalid ones. Neither translation of a
high level language to a machine language, nor execution of the
machine level binary constitutes any reasonable interpretation of
"understanding" the program. There is no homunculus required in your
laptop to translate or run your C program.