Comment by gregjor

Not true, COBOL has as much structure as any other language, if the programmers wrote their code that way.

The main problem with a direct conversion is COBOL has database operations in the language, mapping data directly to variables (records). All modern languages you might translate COBOL to use libraries to perform database operations, and may not even have an off-the-shelf implementation of the pre-relational data structures COBOL was originally designed to work with.