Poor State of Automated Machine-Based Language Translation

You know that automated machine language translation is not in good shape when the editor-in-chief of the IEEE’s Signal Processing Magazine says:

As an anecdote, during the early stage in creating the Chinese translation of the [Signal Processing] magazine, we experimented with automated machine translation first, only to quickly switch to professional human translation. This makes us appreciate why “universal translation” is the “needs and wants” of the future rather than of the present; see [3] for a long list of of future needs and wants to be enabled by signal processing technology.