It’s not hard to find articles about machine translation on the Internet these days if you know how to use Google – even Wikipedia has a comprehensive article on it, which, I have to admit, I have never read thoroughly. Of course, I am aware that machine translators have never been without criticism, and I in particular would never want to be accused of just having a machine translator do my work for me (which begs the unending question of how likely a client would be to do that if they decided to reproach me over anything in my work they identified as a mistake, whether real or imagined – I suppose the particulars vary). Even so, that hasn’t prevented translation agencies offering what they call Machine Translation Post Editing (or MTPE); if you don’t believe me, it’s recognised on the forum on ProZ.com, on which I have had an account for years. Click on this link: https://www.proz.com/forum/machine_translation_mt/318856-rates_per_hour_for_mtpe.html
I like to claim that I can translate better than any machine translator, however good machine translators may be these days, but what exactly do I mean by that? Here’s an example. In one German to English project I translated “Aus fachlicher Sicht erscheine die Beiziehung eines Sachverständigen für Olfaktometrie als nicht erforderlich” (with the main verb in the subjunctive) as “Thus, from a technical point of view, the assistance of an olfactometry expert doesn’t seem necessary” (the subjunctive bit imparted by the word “thus”, since this is what is suggested in a report discussed just before in the preceding sentence).