>Google Translate, plus some critical thinking and a bit of work with a dictionary, will get you a rudimentary understanding of a text in a foreign language ---

>Google Translate, plus some critical thinking and a bit of work with a dictionary, will get you a rudimentary understanding of a text in a foreign language --- and that's a great advance. For some languages it will, they targeted the official working languages of the UN at the time. I hear for them it's pretty good. Personally, I live in Japan and rely on Google Translate every day and my experience has been generally crap. I've seen it get some simpler phrases in Japanese dead wrong and have been noticing it more often the more I learn the language. The part that infuriates me the most is how translations for simple phrases seem to change on an almost daily basis. Not long ago it had a pretty good translation for the formal (keigo) greeting used in business correspondence but as of a few months ago it utterly mangles it. Yes language changes but not this quickly, a lot of these phrases would've been used by the great grandparents of my colleagues.