There has been a staggering amount of innovation in machine translation. Google has some of the leading groups in research for neural machine translation and they put a lot of it into production.

Saying that it works just like Altavista's Bablefish of yore is ridiculous, at least for the European languages I am familiar with. Translation quality as offered by all major services is leagues ahead compared to the state of, say, three years ago.

(Disclaimer: I work on a competitor to Google Translate)