I thought Google Translate uses AI now fairly perfectly.
Why is anyone paying a human translator $40/page when Google Translate is "free"?
I haven't really used them for anything serious in the past few years which is why I asked.
I had just read all of this AI stuff recently about Google using machine learning/AI to better help it's instant audio translation service or something.
Perhaps the only thing they machine-learned was the audio to text conversion part? Not the translation part?
Another point is it misses a lot of context. My girlfriend is fluent in English and Chinese and has an Art History degree. That domain knowledge makes her quite valuable as a translator for Chinese galleries. There's quite a lot of research involved when she does a translation to find the correct terms for techniques, mediums, styles. Translation is more difficult than it would seem on the surface.
If you just need to get the basic gist of something in a different language, then machine translation is obviously more performant.
BTW, I find for German-English, DeepL is better than Google or Bing. That may be the case for the other languages it supports, too. Still not good enough for anything that needs to be correct.