Google Translate for certain language pairs. It's still struggling in others. Even in the pairs it's passable at, regional language variations are a long way of

Google Translate for certain language pairs. It's still struggling in others. Even in the pairs it's passable at, regional language variations are a long way off, as are most original expressions, idioms and any form of localization. It started in the 1950s, and in the last 30 years it has certainly come of age, but it seems like it needs a new level of semantic and contextual linking from this point on, where the multitude of options for each phrase or word can be statistically compared in the context of the whole piece and it's own contextual relationships. This could take another 30 years, or a breakthrough could bring that forward to 5-10 years. Predicting the future is of course a fool's game, but given the ever increasing mass of data being exposed to companies such as Google, it's not wholly unforeseeable. It will be interesting to see if Machine Copywriting or Machine Design start to develop in the coming years, and to consider how inhuman and inconsiderate of the reader/viewer those might be.