Hundreds of millions are spent on translators every year. It's a major expense in the EU budget, for example. A lot of people are going to jail for fraud if people aren't actually doing the work.
Oh, didn't know about that! Learning something new everyday i guess. Automatic translation works very well for technical documents, but it doesn't work that well for novels. So i thought, most of the translation jobs would be gone already. I think, given a little bit of time, a handful of years, translation will be automated 95% or more, across the board, for every kind of document.
I know people in the translation business. Automatic translation is out of the question in a lot of businesses and areas. One category would be safety-critical businesses where companies can get into a world of legal hurt if their translations aren't exact (medical, legal, defense, etc.) Saving a few bucks on automatic translations loses its appeal if you really need the text to be correct. The translators will also be liable for wrong translations, also a very important factor for professional clients.
Another example would be highly specialised, industry-specific texts with a lot of jargon, for which professional translation offices get you translators who aren't just fluent in the languages, but also knowledgeable about the area the text is about.
