The data comes in large part from the documentation of international organizations. Thousands of human translators working for the United Nations and the European Union and so forth have spent millions of hours producing precisely those pairings that Google Translate is now able to cherry-pick. The human translations have to come first for Google Translate to have anything to work with.

The variable quality of Google Translate in the different language pairings available is due in large part to the disparity in the quantities of human-engineered translations between those languages on the Web.

But what of real writing? Google Translate can work apparent miracles because it has access to the world library of Google Books. That’s presumably why, when asked to translate a famous phrase about love from “Les Misérables”  “On n’a pas d’autre perle à trouver dans les plis ténébreux de la vie”  Google Translate comes up with a very creditable “There is no other pearl to be found in the dark folds of life,” which just happens to be identical to one of the many published translations of that great novel. It’s an impressive trick for a computer, but for a human? All you need to do is get the old paperback from your basement.

And the program is very patchy. The opening sentence of Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time” comes out as an ungrammatical “Long time I went to bed early,” and the results for most other modern classics are just as unusable.

Can Google Translate ever be of any use for the creation of new literary translations into English or another language? The first thing to say is that there really is no need for it to do that: would-be translators of foreign literature are not in short supply  they are screaming for more opportunities to publish their work.

But even if the need were there, Google Translate could not do anything useful in this domain. It is not conceived or programmed to take into account the purpose, real-world context or style of any utterance. (Any system able to do that would be a truly epochal achievement, but such a miracle is not on the agenda of even the most advanced machine translation developers.)

However, to play devil’s advocate for a moment, if you were to take a decidedly jaundiced view of some genre of contemporary foreign fiction (say, French novels of adultery and inheritance), you could surmise that since such works have nothing new to say and employ only repeated formulas, then after a sufficient number of translated novels of that kind and their originals had been scanned and put up on the Web, Google Translate should be able to do a pretty good simulation of translating other regurgitations of the same ilk.

So what? That’s not what literary translation is about. For works that are truly original  and therefore worth translating  statistical machine translation hasn’t got a hope. Google Translate can provide stupendous services in many domains, but it is not set up to interpret or make readable work that is not routine  and it is unfair to ask it to try. After all, when it comes to the real challenges of literary translation, human beings have a hard time of it, too.