I’ve always been quick to point out the problems with machine translation, but still use services such as Babelfish for “gisting” (getting the gist of something written in another language). I’m now moving to use Frengly, simply because it will cleverly detect the source language.
Like all of these services, it can be very useful, but won’t be worrying our team of more than 30 translators – a quick test translation revealed that at the start of the year IDT “announced that the first PCIe ® switch in the industry family samples that are tailored to the requirements connection the data and control plane of sophisticated communications applications tailored”.
In a way the poor quality of automatic translations is a good thing – it makes me feel much better about my somewhat limited abilities to speak French and German!