Google develop machine translation tools

The Daily Californian reports today on the announcement by Google that they are taking their Machine Translation service to a higher level.

I have a vested interest in Google and in Machine Translation. On my site we offer free translation tools as a service to the public who want to get the gist of a foreign text. The service is free from our site because it drives traffic and is a perfect leader service to our professional translation service.

The issue for us is that while it's free on our site it costs us to keep it running. Google's entry into machine translation will help this because their entry into these markets always leads to a drop in service charges across the board and an increase in development as the service providers move up a notch to keep up.