> I think Google translate is pretty amazing... (Agreeing with the rest of the comment) Unfortunately, it is not. There are several start-ups naively using it

> I think Google translate is pretty amazing... (Agreeing with the rest of the comment) Unfortunately, it is not. There are several start-ups naively using it for cheap translations of product descriptions and reviews (e.g. Etsy, TripAdvisor, GoogleMaps reviews). At some point they started to translate everything to the system's language(?) by default, which rarely ever works. Even worse, the translations turn out so bad that it feels as if you are looking at a page made up of badly written spam mails. Not really a good way of gaining customer trust. As - for instance on Etsy - I had a hard time displaying the original English product descriptions after they introduced it (the ones translated to German were simply indecipherable), I really wonder whether their popularity in non-English speaking countries has seen a dip after they introduced this side-widely. I appreciate that Hofstadter explains the difficulty of translating so rigorously, and hope people in charge who have no decent experience with second language usage (and thus think Google Translate already does a "good-enough" job) listen.