Also, what you seem to not get is that this isn't a zero sum game.
Google translate doesn't cater to the same people as traditional translators. Google translate basically sucks, it can't compete with a half competent translator. It can however compete with a random friend who knows a hundred words in a language, it can compete with spending 6 hours digging through dictionaries, it can compete with asking people on forums for translations and so on. And it has done more than that.
It has increased the market for translations, things that no one would have ever wanted to translate before can now be translated. Things that would have forever been locked away in one language can now be read, barely, by everyone. This is something that human translators without the net could never achieve. The costs and latency were just too high to use them.
That is what technology does in a nutshell, it takes something that used to belong to the elite and brings it to the masses.
"That is what technology does in a nutshell, it takes something that used to belong to the elite and brings it to the masses."
You can't put technology in a nutshell. Also, you just said stuff nobody wanted to translate can now be crappily translated -- am I understand that this was previously an elite privilege? Why is the one-sentence explanation of what all technology is about, always, different in each post? And what does any of this have to do with me correcting the horrible misrepresentation of the article? That, which I consider my main point stands, the rest I happily concedem because I don't care enough, and you do have a point. But what you said would also be true also for a collaborative, public domain effort, so Google and their middleman dreams can gtfo either way as far as I'm concerned.
Google translate doesn't cater to the same people as traditional translators. Google translate basically sucks, it can't compete with a half competent translator. It can however compete with a random friend who knows a hundred words in a language, it can compete with spending 6 hours digging through dictionaries, it can compete with asking people on forums for translations and so on. And it has done more than that.
It has increased the market for translations, things that no one would have ever wanted to translate before can now be translated. Things that would have forever been locked away in one language can now be read, barely, by everyone. This is something that human translators without the net could never achieve. The costs and latency were just too high to use them.
That is what technology does in a nutshell, it takes something that used to belong to the elite and brings it to the masses.