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That seems unlikely - there aren't too many, they don't make that many calls, and Google could just shut them down.

I think http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2590551 (andymurd) presents a more likely explanation:

> I think the "abuse" they are referring to is the common practise among blackhats of using Google Translate to spin stolen content to make it unique. Translating English -> $LANGUAGE -> English makes for a cheap, low grade article rewriter.

Perhaps to create "unique content" in other languages, to rank in the local google search engines.

No i'm guessing it's things like the CNN scraper that was taking stories, automatically translating them to russian and then posting them. There was one in the news this week for having mistranslated Dominique Strauss Khan as the "head" (as in tip of penis) of the IMF.

Probably not entirely viable nor wanted, but this did give me the idea of Google Translate using steganography to detect translated text through Google Translate to spot abusers. Just by translating the texts a little bit different for each user.