A range of online tools promise to provide rapid and accurate translation of a sentence or even a paragraph. "Approximate" would be a more appropriate description and even this fails to convey the reality. We tried out an experiment with a simple sentence "I am at a loss as to which file to read", which translated as "Je suis à une perte de fichier à lire qui". We challenge any French speaker of sound mind to make sense of this sentence.

Even worse is the retranslation into English of the initial sentence, which comes back as "I am at a loss of that file to read", which requires no further comment on our part...

If the objective of this type of tool is to align words one after the other in the target language, without really making sense, then it has succeeded. "To make sense of the words" – isn’t this precisely what we expect from a human translator ?