A fun game used to be "translate this phrase English to French, then translate it back again and laugh at how meaningless it's made by the round-trip". That doesn't work any more.
As far as I remember it was close to unusable. Even most basic translation to languages besides German, Spanish and French was a nightmare. That was at lest true during my second year at the university (~2010-2011).
From what I've read, the early translations were really rough (but on par with competing free products), until they fired all their linguists and brought in AI guys.
Not exactly. Google Translate was always a statistical approach from day one. That was the reason it was better than the rules engines that dominated before that. The Translate guys really pioneered statistical machine translation.
However it was all done with hand-crafted statistical functions and code. The new stuff using deep learning is the first time it'd have been referred to as "AI".
