I use google’s translator all the time, and it works well – at least for just translating individual phrases or words. But it looks like it’s on the edge of a breakthrough:
To the translation system, any language is treated the same, and there is no manually created rule-set of grammar, metaphors and such. Instead, the system is learning from existing human translations. Google relies on a large corpus of texts which are available in multiple languages.
All it needs is someone to feed the system the two books and to teach it the two are translations from language A to language B, and the translator can create what Franz Och called a “language model.”
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