There exist more objective measurements of translation quality which if you take to be relevant, show that machine translation quality has gotten better between

There exist more objective measurements of translation quality which if you take to be relevant, show that machine translation quality has gotten better between most languages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evaluation_of_machine_translation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evaluation_of_machine_translat... Here's a blogpost by google showing scores creeping up since 2009 https://ai.googleblog.com/2020/06/recent-advances-in-google-translate.html https://ai.googleblog.com/2020/06/recent-advances-in-google-... Also I agree that I don't recall it being awful like the parent poster suggests but maybe only because I reserve 'awful' for the type of rule based machine translation used before statistical approaches came onto the scene.