The Shallowness of Google Translate

As a language lover and an impassioned translator, as a cognitive scientist and a lifelong admirer of the human mind's subtlety, I have followed the attempts to mechanize translation for decades. When I look at an article in Russian, I say, "This is really written in English, but it has been coded in some strange symbols. I will now proceed to decode." Some years later he offered a different viewpoint: "No reasonable person thinks that a machine translation can ever achieve elegance and style. Having devoted one unforgettably intense year of my life to translating Alexander Pushkin's sparkling novel in verse Eugene Onegin into my native tongue (that is, having radically reworked that great Russian work into an English-language novel in verse), I find this remark of Weaver's far more congenial than his earlier remark, which reveals a strangely simplistic view of language.