Google do have a preannounced path throught deprecation to termination and they claim [w]herever possible, the documentation includes suggested alternatives designed to help you achieve similar functionality — whether it’s a new version or related offering.

http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2011/05/spring-cleaning-for-s...

In the case of the translation APIs, they were clearly broken and facilitated content spamming, and the replacement APIs appear to be serviceable.