There's got to be a better way...

It just seems really unjust that a person who has taken the time to manually translate their post into another language for their readers is forbidden from receiving rewards because the content is written in another language already, by that same author

There's a couple of implications that don't sit well with me...

A Hiver must create separate sets of monetized content for each language? If your audience or readership is international and speaks more than one language, you can't tell them the same thing at the same time, and get fairly rewarded for both? The Internet is a global network! Hive is about inclusion! Right? Multilingual people may not feel all that welcome. If a book you've written is translated into another language, you don't just give away the translated copies...

I understand this is likely an unfathomably large and more general problem, with plagiarists ripping off content, running it through
machine translation and then posting it as their own all the time

And it's a thankless job that you do, I'm certain

But this person is saying they translate manually

That's far from 'recycling'