A tip of the tongue

I don’t know what took me so long. It’s old news by now. But I’m still amazed. Here’s a text in English about William Styron, chosen ~~at random~~ from this blog. (Actually, someone else chose it.) Now here it is in Spanish, in French, in German … OK, how about Chinese?
Gawd! Put in any text you like. The translation takes no more than seconds. If the translated text is from a Web page, you can mouse over any particular sentence and have it highlighted in a pop-up box in the original language.
How good are the translations? How should I know? I don’t read Chinese. But I do have some rusty French, some rudimentary Spanish, and a faint recognition of German — and they looked intelligible to me.
Postscript: Supervert writes: “Google’s translation service is just one of the many reasons they approach being a technological equivalent of the old-time conception of divinity. All-knowing and able to speak in tongues… Kicks the shit out of me too. And it all started with an algorithm cooked up by two dorky grad students in a dorm room.”
PPS: Bill Osborne replies, “I always thought God was a bit dumb.” And adds, “Hier are sum dokumenten you can tast the Programm mit.” He offers a comparison of the Googlematic German and Italian translations of this original text in English with the idiomatic German and Italian translations. But he concedes that “even if full of errors and sometimes misleading,” the Google service “will be a boon for an extensive correspondence I have going with someone who only speaks Spanish.”

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