A few years ago I had been told we needed a Spanish translation for the large application that I had written in English. I started out manually copying every English word or phrase from the app and pasting it into Google Translate and then pasting the Spanish translation back into the app. Using the time measured for each translation cycle I determined that given the number of translations needed that it was going to take weeks to complete this task! Then I wrote some code that searched the entire source code for text and wrote it into a file. Then I wrote another program that went through the list of text and automatically retrieved translations from Google Translate and added it as another column in the file (csv). Then my app used the translation list to get the translations during run time. It looked great to me but when I gave the app to a Spanish speaker to evaluate I was told that the Spanish translations were very bad and sometimes silly/funny. My translation file was subsequently given to a translator. They had to change only about 10% of the Spanish. It made things a lot faster for the translator to have 90% of the text being already OK. Unfortunately, Google (and Yahoo too I think) did something to block me from using their translator in this automated way. Too bad, it was very useful.