We should say a few words to defend machine translation. One should remember that MT does not aim to replace the human factor. Let's face it -MT is faster and cheaper. I also am a translator and I know I must defend human translators but as I said the purpose of machine translation is not understood as it is meant to be.

MT could do a lot with translation to and from rare languages. However, this would not be possible within the nex few years because there are not enough resources and corpuses for such languages. There are even less human translators who translate in rare languages.

When you are stuck on a sentence you could ask a machine for a solution I am sure this has happened to most of you who are translators. You don't copy and paste the translation but sometimes even a wrong translation or a different reading of a sentence can help you understant the real meaning.

Automatic translation does not have the same quality as the human translation and its results will never be able to compete with human translation.
But not all of us have a gift for translation and sometimes a translation even with errors can help. Here I am talking about translating something for yourself and not translating something which you are paid for.