Today, you can use a smartphone and Google Translate to have a conversation with someone else even if you don't share a common language.

Most of them now seem to use Google Translate without running the result through the slightest sanity check:

Google Translate is a big step up from the earlier, more primitive translation websites, but the potential for bizarre and embarrassing errors remains.

Its Catalan is fairly easy to translate into English using Google Translate.

Town Hall official website- (Portuguese: Use Google Translate to convert to other languages)

Microsoft Research and Google Translate have implemented alpha version machine translators based on the Carnegie Mellon data.

Sticking one block of text into Google Translate produced this: "Great Comrade Kim Jong Il started his revolutionary leadership..."; I think you get the flavour.

In August 2008, Google launched a Google Translate HTML5 web application for iOS for iPhone and iPod touch users.

Like that version, the Google Translate for the iPhone (free) quickly translates your spoken phrases into text, and for 24 languages, Google Translate will speak the new phrase in a foreign tongue.

On May 26, 2011, Google announced that the Google Translate API had been deprecated and that it would cease functioning on December 1, 2011, "due to the substantial economic burden caused by extensive abuse."

Because Google Translate uses statistical matching to translate rather than a dictionary/grammar rules approach, translated text can often include apparently nonsensical and obvious errors, often swapping common terms for similar but nonequivalent common terms in the other language, as well as inverting sentence meaning.

However, there are many programs now available that are capable of providing useful output within strict constraints; several of them are available online, such as Google Translate and the SYSTRAN system which powers AltaVista's (Yahoo's since May 9, 2008) BabelFish.