Money earnings not considered, which ability would you rather have?

If those are the only two choices, I'll wait for the next genie.

Electronic translators just don't seem to work very well. Just pick out a random chess page written in Russian or Arabic and run it through Google's translator on the web, all you get is gibberish. Even German which is closely related to English doesn't translate all that well. But computers do play chess very well, when I want a really strong opponent to train with I play with a chess engine and I lose every time but I do learn a lot. 

Languages would be a lot more interesting.  If you knew all the languages you'd probably have interesting insights into language and culture.

And as Phylar said, I'd rather learn chess and have my own personal achievements and failures.

It would be great if I could understand non-verbal communication perfectly! That is by far the most widespread language on earth, but it has a lot of dialects, which makes it sometimes really hard to understand. I'd pick that choice immediately.

By best do you mean I win to all players and chess engines flawlessly? Or I am the top player with 1 more elo rating?

If the first, greatest chess player, else the latter.

I'd rather be able to verbally communicate with anyone.

You don't need to be the "best" chess player to play good games.

Another angle is: if you work as a translator, you're at the beck and call of those who need you. And if you refuse to come, there are others who can fill in. You are replaceable.

If you are the best chess player in the world, tournament organizers must pay you an appearance fee, ensure acceptable playing conditions, etc. to get you to come to their event, or the event loses prestige.

"You may have just destroyed me in several chess games, but I bet you don't understand what I just said about your mother in Swahili!"

Chess IS one of the major languages, so sign me up for the major languages!

Of course you would be able to read and write all the languages too.

I rather enjoy learning most things, so to me this question is "which would you rather shortcut?" 

My learning progression with chess is rather pleasurable, so I'd rather not have that journey cut short.  But I wouldn't mind cutting out language learning, especially when I can then communicate with almost every human.  (wait - did the question imply only human languages?  If not, that's even better!)

Definitely chess. When I first learned a second language it was very fascinating to me, but now it's like, I get it, people use different combinations of sounds to symbolize ideas than I do. I don't need to actually know what those different sounds are to appreciate that

Knowing all languages would be convenient, and a really cool thing to flaunt to people, but not something I would take if it means ridding me of the opportunity to be the best at a game I love. I also think the better I get, the more nuanced my appreciation for the game would be. For every next game I play, I will wade through deeper and more interesting logical ideas than ever. Though the external admiration is probably much less with chess than with a language master, still, it's enough even if I could only get chess players to look up to me.

I was under the impression that if I learned Russian, I would automatically become fantastic at chess.

So languages :)

La dix-septieme siecle, c'est fini... obviously I could use the language thing...

It's important to be able to talk to bees and squirrels.

And blue budgies.

Money earnings not considered, which ability would you rather have?

You don't think you'd get bored of chess after you're the best player in the world?  And wouldn't at admiration feel pretty empty knowing you didn't work for it?

If the question is if I'd rather work hard and eventually achieve ______ then ok, I'd switch my answer to chess.

Like I said, I think the higher skill level would allow me to appreciate the game even more (that is one of my key points here). Every little detail in tactical variations for example, I would take note of. Pretty much I would do the same thing as I always do -- plan, calculate, etc, but I would be doing it all in a more sophisticated way. Even though the patterns and skills would be transplanted into my brain (I'm assuming, if I were to accept this "offer"), I would still feel them as much as with my "natural" 1900 brain :)

The improving process never stops! Houdini would have plenty of things to show me, and I may actually try to make sense of the variations it spits out if I want to make my play even better. Now, if I was turned into a machine that solved chess, then, yes, it would get boring. But to simply be the best, maybe 2900 ish, I would be better than everyone else yet still have tons to learn.

And indeed, aside from this it would, in general, feel pretty great to have the kind of understanding of a world champion. It's easy to poke holes in the idea of being shot up into the top so suddenly, but we might not be so inclined to do so if we had a taste of what it would truly feel like, rather than speculating about it from a distance.

Ok, as long as you could still work on chess that's fine.  I see what you mean by appreciating the game more, that's an interesting point.  I might want to change my answer to chess hmm.

I was also thinking of a monkey's paw type scenario where there's a catch e.g. your skill is permanently set by the #2 player.  If they get better, so do you.  If they get worse, you do too.  Not part of the original question though, I know