Seeing as translation is a pretty big deal in this community, I thought you might be interested in this video. The timestamped url (at 8:18; segment ends around 10:00, so very short) should redirect you to the exact moment with the presenter begins talking about their recent upgrades to auto-translation.

This is a pretty big deal. Remember, their quality comparison of a human translation is that of a bilingual professional translator, who tend to have not only a better grasp of both languages but also more willingness/dedication to spend time than hobbyist translators that we see in the community. I can say that a large number of translators (at least back when I did translations) do stick to phrase-based translation with very little sentence restructuring -- which is extremely tiresome, time consuming, and, unless the translator has the language mastery of a Interpreter (who can accurately translate in real time), it forces the translator to stop read-translating and switch to 'editing mode' after every line. This is one of the key reasons why fan translators often spit out very awkward, easy to misunderstand sentences that will give your English teacher a heart attack, because they still mirror the original JP/CN sentence structure.

It is apparent that Google is rapidly overcoming this hurdle, with their auto-translator increasingly able to restructure a sentence and even reformat multiple sentences.

The fact that google has integrated machine learning with their web based translators (although this is not new) also mean that their translation software will be growing and learning faster than any human translator is capable of. It's likely why their CN-EN translator has been doing so well, seeing as this is easily the most commonly encountered language barrier in the world (sorry JP, you're just not as important when it comes to international business).

It won't be long now before hobbyist translators are obsolete. Professional translators will be around for longer, because humans prefer to have another human do fact-checking (because for some reason, our hormone-addled, emotional brains are more trustworthy than logical electronic circuits? Yeah right). But in the long run? When you look at it in terms of decades instead of just years? Yeah... robots are totally taking over our jobs.

P.S. Remember this post?