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.