Many SMT systems are based on European Court, but Google's had people working on acquiring parallel texts for years now and has one of the largest corpora of pa

Many SMT systems are based on European Court, but Google's had people working on acquiring parallel texts for years now and has one of the largest corpora of parallel texts in existence digitally, as far as I know. Quality is logarithmically proportional to the volume of unique text available. Thus, there's a rough formula for every doubling of the corpus for any language, quality increases by a few points (on a well known scale of translation quality). The general assumption is that over time this statistical technique, along with the growing data acquisition of Google, will approach human quality. But you can assume Google's tried to acquire tons of available parallel texts. Book translations, government (any multilingual gov't is great, Canada for ex), religion, etc. Sky's the limit.