Actually, Google Translate was an enormous leap forward in machine translation quality. It won a number of awards for its astonishingly good performance. And its design premise is that you can use really simple algorithms if you have crazy amounts of training data (a then controversial approach called 'statistical machine translation' - as opposed to rule/grammar based).

Look at Norvig (Google's head of research, and AI-demigod) at al's paper "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data."