Klash: translation between languages may not be that hard, but it is hard enough that not everybody can do it and tends to cost between 5 and 25 cents US per word depending on the language combination, who's doing it, and the number of intermediaries involved. Machine translation isn't worth a flying Philadelphia fuck at the moon at present; one of its numerous weaknesses is in dealing robustly with errors in the source text, which are not exactly rare in an environment like Everything. A rapid empirical survey of an statistically inadequate sample of professional translators on everything reveals that they mostly feel that they spend enough time translating for money at the moment and are a bit unwilling to dedicate much time to pro bono publico (pro bono omnes?) work, I'm afraid.



Hmmm ... in retrospect: overexposure to badly written source texts can lead an overworked translator to entirely overlook sarcasm and irony in others.