I read that thread and noticed a lot of confusion. One
translator
admitted she never even tried it, but still had lots of negative stuff
to say; more than one person said they found it useful (see
Esperantisto's response), and other people seemed to not realize there
was a difference between Google Translate and Google Translator
Toolkit.
GTTK allows you to create your own translation memories, much like Trados or Wordfast. If
there is nothing in your memory to correspond, however, you get pretty much the same
translation that you get in Google Translate.
In that sense, Google Translate gives us a good indication of what Google's
translators get when they start on a Wikipedia article.
You can all try this: go to a random Japanese or German or Hindi WP article, and paste the
text into Google Translate to have it translated into your language.
http://translate.google.com/
This is what the translator will have to start from.
A.