My guess is that they are not, or at least, not in a way that would make economic sense. The NSA doesn't have superpowers. They have a lot of competent people,

My guess is that they are not, or at least, not in a way that would make economic sense. The NSA doesn't have superpowers. They have a lot of competent people, paid to work on topics that are are important to state security, but I think they are lagging behind on topics with profitable commercial applications. And machine translation is one of these. The reason I think that is that working for a three letter agency comes with a burden of secrecy, and obviously, people tend not to work as efficiently if they are not allowed to talk to each others. These institutions are also plagued with pork-barrel economics, and secrecy is also a good way to hide incompetence. So if a private company can do it, it is better to let them do.