Question: Can anyone recommend another Translation API? The problem is that the translation work that Google does is the best out there that I've seen, and I'm not even sure if there's a decent alternative to be found.
Depending on your needs, you could consider human based translation, which is generally more accurate than machine-based translation. Over at myGengo (http://mygengo.com/) we offer an API to help people get translations done by an actual translator, as opposed to a machine (think Mechanical Turk, but focused on translation). Feel free to check it out - various libraries abound:
http://mygengo.com/services/api/
An advantage to going with this approach is that the myGengo API can also return a machine translation while a job is being worked on; a takeaway here is that even if a service like Google shuts down, it should be fairly simple to use another service behind the scenes, keeping a nice level of transparency for you.
Of course, if you'd like to stick with general machine translations, you could check out the following - should be close enough:
I would also add that because translation is core to our business, we would never deprecate the translation API :)