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Google translate works well when the text is grammatically correct, when running it across comments where people use slang it doesn't work all that well (obviously).

It's the future where I can translate an article written by someone in another language on another continent into (semi)-readable text in my own language.

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Your sentence is perfectly correct, but its translation in french (by google translate) is far from perfect. The translation toward english is generally not so bad, but for me, google translate is still very poor.

I think it depends largely on the source and target languages and how similar they are (in what ways I couldn't say with real certainty). Japanese -> English translations are pretty much always hilariously bad, but then we get at least some very good German -> English instances like this. Without unprecedented advancements I doubt automated translation between two highly disparate language families will be consistently usable any time soon.

Google Translations gets most of it's source data from the regulatory documents of the European Union which are required to be translated into the language of every member.

Perhaps if we were to get a similar source for Japanase -> English translations the accuracy would improve drastically.

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