It already works very well, especially after its improvement in the recent years after using neural networks. I've frequently been surprised by the quality of the translation it provides to Japanese sentences, not to mention between German and English. The test cases I put in in some other languages (e.g. Chinese) are really promising too.
Machine translation is a really hard problem. The messiness of language as a system, the importance of context in daily conversation etc. all play a part. Another layer of complexity is the gap between everyday usage and official, written form, which is also being tackled by researchers. You have to put this thing into perspective. Many of the old rule-based/Chomskyan software have been simply unusable for decades. New statistical approaches have been in use for barely 10 years, and industrial deep learning less than half a decade. There are still much more to come. The hype IMO is well justified.
Well, that's really not my experience, nor is it the experience of the author of the article. The examples given in the article speak for themselves, really.
Machine translation is a really hard problem. The messiness of language as a system, the importance of context in daily conversation etc. all play a part. Another layer of complexity is the gap between everyday usage and official, written form, which is also being tackled by researchers. You have to put this thing into perspective. Many of the old rule-based/Chomskyan software have been simply unusable for decades. New statistical approaches have been in use for barely 10 years, and industrial deep learning less than half a decade. There are still much more to come. The hype IMO is well justified.