[vadimberman]

> I think it is safe to say that Google Translate almost never macthes the skills of human translators except for rare trivial cases. As a rule it's rubbish, and sometimes as an exception it can be OK.

Depends on the language pair. Depends on the human translator. I met translators who wouldn't compete against 1990s Babelfish / SYSTRAN well. They still had some business.

[mojuba]

I think it is unfair and even wrong to compare GT to the job of professional real time translation, because the latter is probably one of the most challanging jobs that I know of, next to astronauts and film stuntmen. Instead, what we mean most of the time is "this piece of text in the language I speak fluently that came out of Google Trabslate reads like nonsense to me, but I kinda get it (though sometimes I don't)". Meaning, it's way below my standards of quality for a language I know very well.

[icebraining]

Who said anything about real time?

[pjc50]

Google translate has lots of disadvantages but it is at least fast. Professional written translators manage a few tens of words a minute; professional simultaneous translators manage to keep up most of the time but are occasionally defeated by languages with very different sentence structures, and require frequent breaks.