[tchaffee]

Google's main income comes from its adverts business and that heavily relies on data collected from its users. Mail, translate, maps, and search are monetized. It's just not you paying for them.

If you all of a sudden start using Google Translate for Spanish and you think the phrases you are translating won't get used to serve you more targeted adverts for your upcoming vacation, you're being a bit naive.

Google Translate is being monetized. It's as easy a guess as yours to say that there's no way in hell Google Translate stays around if it didn't already pay for itself a long time ago. But let's stop guessing please.