Does the updated Google translation tool eliminate the need for human translators?

（Edited by freelance Chinese translator li – English to Chinese or Chinese to English translation services）
According to a China Herald blog the newly updated Google translation tool, when compared to Babelfish, actually makes some sense. In a test done with Chinese translations, professional Chinese translators say that about 60% of the translation is correct. The software picks the most commonly used characters, but they are not always the right ones.

According to Google “We feed the computer with billions of words of text, both monolingual text in the target language, and aligned text consisting of examples of human translations between the languages. We then apply statistical learning techniques to build a translation model. We have achieved very good results in research evaluations”.

Do we recommend using it? Perhaps it is useful for limited applications such as technical translations with little grammatical complexity and low incidence of words with multiple meanings. It might also be useful for informal reading of a foreign text and get a “general idea” about the document.