The Artificial Intelligence Behind Google Translate Recently Did Something Extraordinary

As someone who lives between two countries, I've relied heavily on machine translation for a number of years. It took me years before I could communicate casually with my in-laws (they're fluent in German and Polish, but not English), without my wife serving as an interpreter. I realize that nothing beats a skilled human translator. But who has time (or money) to hire a person to translate simple, everyday tasks? That's why I've always been amazed at computer-aided translation, specifically Google Translate.