from Google Blogoscoped:
Google switched to a new translation system for the remaining language pairs on the Google Translator which were so far provided by Systran. The translator help files don’t mention this yet, but it might be possible that the new translations are the results of Google’s in-house machine translation efforts.
In a quick comparison between Systran translation and Google translation of the English German language pair, I couldn’t see a clear winner yet (though I get the feeling Google’s results are slightly superior), but a lot of garbage results on both ends. Translating a sample blog post into German, for instance, was so bad that you’d have a hard time making any sense out of what was written if you don’t speak English. While it might help to get the point across for some texts, you start to wonder if these kind of translations in the wild will cause more understanding in the world, or more misunderstanding.