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I wonder what they consider 'abuse' to be. I was thinking about writing a dictionary app, and hooking into that API as a secondary translation would have been nice.

I wouldn't consider that abuse... Not even if it was the primary translation.

But I can't figure what people would be doing that was abusive?

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I will hazard a guess that people were using it to 'spin' content for SEO purposes, by automatically translating others' content to foreign languages and back again.

If so, I imagine the double resource drain of doing that and then Googlebot indexing all that useless content would be a compelling reason to turn it off.

Also, its difficult to monetize the API, for example, with ads.

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