There is still a long way to go for machines to be able to translate like a human. For those in the United States, they just did a man vs. machine battle on Jeopardy. The machine won. The impressive part was that it was able to interpret natural language questions and not just simple questions. BUT. The computer was a huge super computer that is purely designed for that purpose with years of work on English.
The things I am interested to see get better are things like Google Conversation:
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/201...translate.html
In this case, getting it close would be good enough in many cases. Maybe in another 5 years? Maybe 10?