One reason current machine translation looks pretty good is that over the years a lot of human translation has been remarkably bad. (I say this as a former member of the American Translators Association who made my living for several years as a Chinese-English translator and interpreter.) Most clients of most translators can only check the accuracy of one of the translator's languages, which allows for a good bit of bluffing. I'm getting better and better satisfied since the 1990s with machine-translated texts I see on the Web, for example translations of my own personal homepage into other languages I know well enough to read.
