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I was recently typing in some phrases from a 19th century book in French (which I'd found on Google Books), and it was interesting to watch the translation morph as I typed and provided more context. It wasn't perfect translation in the end, but I was still pretty impressed.

I did - I used it to translate from simplified Chinese to English, and the results where extremly impressive - there where very few mistakes and some of the paragraphs read like they had been written by a professional translater.

Like most MT engines, Google Translate quality varies wildly by language pair. When MT is used for pre-translation in professional translation settings, it's pretty common to cherry-pick particular engines for particular source and target locales.